What’s most notable about “The Informers,” the fourth adaptation of a novel by Bret Easton Ellis? During the screening, in reel three, there was a very interesting bit of fuzz that got caught in the gate and lingered at the bottom of the frame for a bit before escaping in a wild hairy burst across the frame. Turpitude and torpor: if this is decadence, give me Häagen-Dazs. Director Gregor Jordan’s earlier movies like “Buffalo Soldiers” (2002) had elements that kept him in the “promising” category. This inert botch kicks him out of it. The quality I admire about Ellis’ writing is the rhythm of his prose. The way words accumulate can convey affectlessness on the page in the way movies can’t with real human beings shuffling across the screen. In “The Informers,” which Ellis adapted from his 1983-set novel with Nicholas Jarecki (director of the 2005 bio-doc on filmmaker James Toback), vapid Angelenos fall into demonic vice, or more correctly, daily doldrums lightly inflected by drug, fuck and neediness. There’s no dramatic momentum and there’s less a problem of characters being unsympathetic as uninflected. It doesn’t help that the cast is mostly comprised of weak actors who can’t hold the screen, or that Mickey Rourke, playing a child-drugging, child-raping, child-kidnapping sleaze comes off as merely a beaten slab of man-tan. Dull characters, like the four mopey leads, male blond dye-jobs all whom you can’t tell apart, are just pallid dullards, rather than insightful or intriguing reflections of cultural anomie. You’d think anomie would come readily to a movie with an engagingly tacky soundtrack heavy on the likes of Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days,” Gary Numan’s “Cars,” A Flock of Seagulls’ “I Ran” and Men Without Hats’ “Safety Dance.” The madness of Bruno Dumont’s “29 Palms,” that would be nice. The explosive ending of “Zabriskie Point”: that would be powerful. Give me tony ennui, or bring me another cuppa coffee. A rail-thin Billy Bob Thornton with a hairpiece of visible yet fascinating needlework comes off as a louche polecat; as his newsreader mistress, Winona Ryder pops her large eyes, and as his estranged, teen-boffing wife, Kim Basinger makes the mistake of acting as if she were in a real movie. The female lead, a perpetually topless blonde unicorn doodler, is held up in the final shot as a bruised, blotched, bikinied symbol of… something. The movie seems to want to embody the line from Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good And Evil,” “If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” In the case of “The Informers,” Nicht. One of the blonds mopes, “I need someone to tell me what’s good and someone to tell me what’s bad.” Joan Didion’s novel, “Play It as It Lays”: Good. The film of “The Informers”: Bad. 98m. Widescreen. (Ray Pride)

By Ray Pride

The stockings are still hung by the chimney with care.

Surveying a couple hundred year-end lists by movie reviewers and entertainment writers can be a soul-squishing thing, particularly if you read the reasoning and rationales, the dithers, the doubts, the demurrals, the dishing and dashing to and fro, recurring, recurring. Oh, that’s what “The Dark Knight” was about! (No, it wasn’t, but thanks for watching.) Oh, that’s why “Slumdog Millionaire” is so special! (Um, where’s the fun? Fun? Energy? Bold colors? Remember.) That’s why “Wall-E” is the best movie since, in, well, since, ever! And doesn’t Eve deserve a best actress nomination? (I can’t get animated. Sorry. An hour of the apocalypse followed by this week’s adventure with The Inedibles?)

It was years ago, a bit, I will concede, before the turn of the century, the dawn of the millennium, but I do remember when I was a moviegoer on the street corner, looking up at the marquees of the Cinema or State-Lake, the Oriental or the Granada, the Sandburg. The Sandburg… whose cinephile operators went on to respectively produce “Election” and “Little Miss Sunshine” or “Milk” and “Synecdoche, New York.” I’ll even get teary going past a storefront recognizable as having once been a neighborhood theater. Say, the Wicker Park, now the John Fluevog store on Milwaukee Avenue below North Avenue, or the Parkway, now an optical store just south of the Landmark Century.) Those were the days. Those were the days. Stale smells and bright lights and furtive goings-on in the balcony. Civilian cinephilia: by this time of the season, I would not have had the chance to have seen all the films, or the privilege to have seen some movies several times before they hit Chicago. That was also before the epoch of knowing a movie would usually be available for rental eighty days after its release, dropping neatly through the mail slot the afternoon of its street date if you were one of the subscribers picked out of the Netflix queue.

I’m not sure how the experience a 22-year-old civilian cinephile who’s not visibly, volubly blogging his or her little heart out would simmer in today’s distribution picture. I do know a video-besotted bunch of talented amateurs, but they’re knowing as hell. The average moviegoer, though, may be confused by the return of the “platform release.”

Less a matter of being parsimonious than returning to canny marketing of the past years, distributors large and small have taken their sweet time in releasing movies, whether a matter of them not having come to Chicago at all yet, or perhaps only on a couple of screens for a week, two, three. Universal did its work releasing Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” a few months back, a bigger picture, with a star (Angelina Jolie) in a star performance in the middle of it. It was released in hundreds of theaters. Didn’t do all that well. Now Warner’s got “Gran Torino,” a smaller, darker, profane, sometimes mad Eastwood picture. The powers that be seemed to have watched that disappointment as well as the platforming of movies like “Slumdog Millionaire.” The figures say Eastwood’s purported last acting role is only at eighty-four theaters, but goes to about 2,250 this weekend.

“Slumdog Millionaire,” on over 100 best-of lists, brightens only about 600 screens. (An oddity: Warners, who turned most of the rights to “Slumdog” over to Fox Searchlight later this month releases “Chandi Chowk Goes To China,” a Chinese-Bollywood comedy hybrid in a few dozen theaters.)

Does the anticipation build? Or are audiences, pounded by politics, going “eek!” about the economy mentally changing the channel? In Chicago, for the early weeks of some releases, the committed theatergoer gets to know well the smell and sound of AMC’s River East multiplex.

Another example: Mickey Rourke’s been named best actor for “The Wrester” by critics’ circles in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Florida, Kansas City, Oklahoma, San Diego, San Francisco, Toronto, Utah and D. C. For the same movie, Marisa Tomei’s gotten nods from Detroit, Florida, Las Vegas, Oklahoma, Phoenix, San Diego and San Francisco. How many theaters across the nation? Eighteen.

Sometimes I don’t want to be in my own shoes, but I’m glad my post-collegiate years as a filmgoer are tied up in my edifice complex, remembering without trying not just where I saw a movie for the first time, but often the seat where I sat.

A young film lover can buy and rent and download enormous chunks of the medium’s history, but the present tense is my concern. When does movie-watching become merely curatorial, a decadent arraying of lovely narratives and unmatchable images that can no longer be produced because of all manner of economic factors not worthy listing here.

Take “Watchmen.” Tied up in a very serious legal action caused by some bad lawyering: but the politics-charged Japanese trailer was released online Tuesday. Nixon and Kissinger in a Stanley Kubrick-Ken Adam war room? Lovers in the desert kissing in front of the rising orange bloom of nuclear irradiation? One more corner to loiter on. How soon is now?

By Ray Pride

Angel-feather tats twine a stripper’s back; twinned, a wrestler’s is lined with scar, knotted by scarification.

“The Wrestler” sears because of its two central roles, Mickey Rourke as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a beat-down wrestler in his early 50s, and Marisa Tomei as “Cassidy” (nee Pam), a stripper he feels close to as the walls of his life close in around him. Brave and sometimes literally naked: they make a tremendous match as performers. And that dovetailing seems a suitable fit for the films Darren Aronofsky’s made so far: Try as the mind might, thought cannot save the flesh.

The Ram, Aronofsky says, “loves what he does and he’s got that going for him. What’s the theme—how do you make a movie about wrestling? Everyone says, ‘Oh, wrestling’s fake, why do you want to make that?’ But that becomes the theme, what is real and what is fake? That became the big challenge of the Ram character in the movie. Where is his real world and where is his fantasy world, and has he confused them? And that carried us over to the stripper story and her really clear lines between what is real and what is fake.”

From the start, Tomei’s substantial qualities as an actor forestall the fear of stripper clichés. And once the two of them are circling each other, you realize that at that point in their lives, they’re mirrors: Merchants of flesh, exploiters of their own bodies, just past their prime.

“Yeahhh…” Aronofsky says, pausing. “When you do an independent film, with a stripper, all the red flags go up, ’cause you’re like, ‘Oh shit! Why am I doing this?’ I remember fighting with myself and with the writer, what else can she be, what else can we make her? But the attraction of how similar they actually are: They both have stage names. They both dress up. They both create a fantasy for the audience. They both use their bodies for their commerce and age is their enemy. Those connections between the two of them were just too delicious to want to live without.”

The movie was under most filmgoer’s radar before its Venice première, where it won the Golden Lion. “Yeah, it was instant acclamation, to be honest,” he says. “We finished the film two days before Venice. We were mixing. We finished the mix like a week and a half before, and then there’s a lot of tech things that have to go right, the sound and image have to get married, you have to check prints to make sure the color’s right. It was very last minute, then we had to get it over to Rome to get it subtitled. That last week was quite a rush job to get it done. Only a few people had seen it at that point. Of course, the Venice festival had seen it and invited us to attend. But we didn’t have any sense of what the audience reaction would be. We landed in Venice and then a day later we did the press conference, and the press gave us a standing ovation, which I guess they don’t do. It just took off from there. It was a rocket ship. I don’t think anyone was ready, me, Mickey, anybody. We all had high hopes.” Or else you wouldn’t have struggled so hard to make the thing, and to make it with the almost-impossible-to-finance Rourke. Aronofsky thinks. “For me it was always a portrait film, a character study. It’s not filled with politics; it’s not filled with the obvious heartstrings. It was a real chance for me to work with who I thought is one of the great actors of our times. It was a unique world. I think what I learned, my lesson, was that all you need is an honest performance and a lens to make a good movie.”

The film’s use of austere locations, including perhaps the last pay phone in New Jersey and a deserted boardwalk, seem to gain from budgetary restriction. But in fact it’s almost as if what could be just a painful necessity becomes part of the palette of the film. “Definitely, that’s always been my school of filmmaking, you turn your limits into your strengths. You really identify what you can do and you push it as hard as you can and then within that kind of circle, you create as well as you can what you can do.”

“The Wrestler” is now playing.

RECOMMENDED

“The world doesn’t give a shit about me. I’m here. I’m really here.” I don’t know all the implications that can be wrought from this great line in “The Wrestler,” an original script by Robert D. Siegel, a former editor of The Onion. But self-pity is never part of it. Mickey Rourke, a thousand punches, blows and self-lacerations since his pretty-boy days of “Diner” and “Rumble Fish,” is the fleshy center of Darren Aronofsky’s movie, passion played again and again. Simple and unadorned, it’s both tragic and touching. Rourke plays “Randy the Ram” Robinson, a professional wrestler in his early 50s, living day-by-day, match-by-match, pill-by-pill. He’s a lonely man. Rourke plays him without vanity, unless you consider the vanity of stripping to muscle as if muscle were bone. One of Randy’s great hopes is getting closer to “Cassidy” (Marisa Tomei), a stripper he frequents. Tomei’s quietly fierce performance keeps stripper clichés at bay. There are jokey references to “The Last Temptation of Christ” as they banter in the club’s space to the side. The rending of flesh is made particular. It both diminishes and embellishes Randy’s ground-level transfiguration. And quickly, quietly, it sneaks in—you realize that “The Ram” and “Cassidy” are mirrored: merchants of flesh, exploiters of their own bodies, right past their prime. It’s a powerful duality, especially within the actors’ mutual lacks of vanity. Later, there’s a gag with a small kid who’s bored by the Nintendo game that featured Randy: pixels past prime. Steeped in sorrow, mingling overstatement and understatement, “The Wrestler” is smart, goofy, heartening entertainment. With Evan Rachel Wood, Todd Barry, Mark Margolis. 109m. Widescreen. An interview with Aronofsky will appear next week. (Ray Pride)

The 44th Chicago International Film Festival continues through October 29, and highlights include a repeat showing of Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler,” with Mickey Rourke as a man whose body had been his living is killing himself with it; “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” a seeming mock-doc about a real, middle-aged Canadian heavy metal band; and “Wesley Willis’ Joyrides,” which chronicles the local musician who did not make it to middle age. Erick Zoncka’s “Julia,” with Tilda Swinton in the central role, reportedly examines the far reaches of a troubled woman’s sanity; it’s his first feature since “The Dreamlife of Angels.” James Gray moves outside of his usual realm of New York corruption to examine a love affair between two troubled souls, played by Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, in “Two Lovers”; holiday family conflict is on the menu in Arnaud Desplechin’s “A Christmas Tale,” a worthy complement to his earlier features like “My Sex Life… or How I Got Into An Argument” and “Kings and Queen.” Stefan Forbes’ “Boogey Man: The Story of Lee Atwater” is the most seasonal of attractions, dealing with the amoral life and painful, slow death of the political advisor who developed much of the Republican style of campaigning, and was a mentor to Karl Rove. It’s almost possible to believe that such a loathsome man existed, but Forbes does fine work in capturing his life and legacy. Established directors are on hand as well, with Andrzej Wajda’s “Katyn,” about the aftereffects of the Russian slaughter of the cream of the Polish military; Jerzy Skolimowski’s “Four Nights With Anna,” reportedly a return to form for the genially absurdist director of “Deep End” and “Moonlighting”; and Hong Kong action master Johnny To’s “Sparrow” makes its Chicago debut. (Ray Pride)

Full schedule at chicagofilmfestival.com

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.