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

Ever since its Berlin debut, I’d been anticipating Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky.”

Something seemed so bright and right about the irrepressible central figure in the trailers and clips and stills, a 30-year-old primary school teacher nicknamed “Poppy,” played by Sally Hawkins. The promise of an offhandedly serious movie with a light surface described through behavior, told through a bright, brash woman with the most generous of heart seemed solid.

But the actual movie is a wallop all its own, thankfully, gratefully. Leigh, whose films include “Naked” and “Secrets And Lies,” works for extended periods with actors to create his scripts, drawing upon the experiences of all involved. The result, at its best, is enthralling. Under the credits, we see Poppy on her bicycle, moving through London traffic with expressions of confidence and curiosity: an image of someone confident in their life moving through the world. Hawkins is a petite brunette with an enormous smile, radiating genuine charisma. When she returns from an encounter with a grumpy clerk at a bookstore, the bicycle’s gone. “We never even got a chance to say goodbye!” Poppy says to herself. It was only the first of many moments falling in love with a character: several scenes sketch in seeming irresponsibility and her giddiness with her female friends, but we soon discover her real place in the world, in a classroom filled with children. Sunny, chirpy, almost obnoxiously so, Poppy embodies the ideal that compassion should be extended to all, that dignity is everyone’s right. (There’s a central encounter with a stranger I won’t describe where language falls away and empathetic listening is all.)

London matters. Poppy’s grounded in the places she frequents, where she meets her friends, the streets where a series of increasingly fraught driving lessons take place. She seems, in the phrase of Walter Benjamin, to know that a city’s learned by getting intelligently lost.

Leigh always provides a splendid, lived-in sense of place. Talking to the 65-year-old director last week, I wondered why this is such a part of his work. “It just is. You see… For all that you’ve read and that everyone says, of course I make films about people, it’s about character, it’s central to the whole thing. I’m equally concerned by fundamental instinct and by impulse, about making films about place as well as people… about time, about seasons, about weather, about light, about the things that any poet would express in a poem. I would say about smell, except obviously you can’t deal with that in film. And so, on the work we do, [it's] always very, very thorough and we’re very specific. The specificity of what I do is important, of course, when I cast and, of course, what world, very specifically, these characters are rooted in. So the organic, the inevitable relationship between person, between character and place, the way the locations are part, are characters in their own right, if you like, is all absolutely central and integral. Or course, that isn’t to be confused in any shape or form with the notion that I’m concerned with making films about the specific environment or world, which is to say, you know, nearly all the films I have been made have been shot, and therefore set in London. Only because we could never afford to go anywhere else! Because the costs that are involved are preclusive. I’m now being called ‘cinema’s London poet,’ all this kind of stuff. But actually that’s the reason. But given that that’s what we’re doing, I simply drop anchor and say, ‘Okay, fine.’ But actually, the stories to be told are many and various. And actually, ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’ is no more concerned with being about London as such than ‘Naked’ or ‘Secrets and Lies’ or anything else. I hope that the films are universal, every story, every novel has to have its specificity and that’s its milieu.”

Leigh concludes, “London is great metaphor for the world. I’m not really concerned with that. But they are. ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’ could happen in Chicago, in principle.”

In Chicago, I note, I’ve talked to any number of teachers and educators, who, like Poppy, recognize how any individual child’s neglect or bullying could have repercussions we could never predict. Bluntly put, you fuck with one child, you fuck with the future. “Any child… And that is absolutely commensurate with what this film is about. Poppy is a very active [believer] in teaching kids as an act of optimism, nurturing the future.” It’s not the immediate future of the two hours of the narrative or two weeks in the child’s life, either. “No, non, no. The kids that Poppy is teaching are the grandparents of the late twenty-first century. They will be remembered by twenty-second-century citizens. If there are any.”

“Happy-Go-Lucky” opens Friday at Landmark Century

 

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.

RECOMMENDED

For anyone who’s ever rued the lack of febrile, singular movies in an indie scene dominated by timid themes and reticent filmmaking, times may be changing. Azazel Jacobs’ painful, acute, so-darkly-funny-you-can’t-breathe psychological study, “Mama’s Man,” is due this fall, and sometimes film projectionist Ronald Brownstein’s shot-on-16mm “Frownland” is up to bat now. My mind’s clouded a bit after reading David Carr’s “The Night of the Gun,” in which a manipulative, abusive crack-addict loser works his way day by day to sobriety and a column in the New York Times. Brownstein’s gritty, grimy study of a manipulative, abusive loser named Keith Sontag (Dore Mann) is a collection of notes on crap, an unstinting look at a sweaty, fumbling, inarticulate, inexplicably troubled man in his 20s. Or, as his roommate calls him, “a burbling troll.” (And, as Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay aptly dubbed it: “sludgy miserablism.”) One rises, another falls: big city, small world. In the most squirmy aspect of the movie’s abrasive miseries is the underlying sense that Sontag is a New York everyman: that city could drive anyone into the basement, quivering wetly onto filthy couch cushions. Brownstein cites Mike Leigh as a key influence, but there’s less vaudeville here and more authentic self-loathing. It’s a singular achievement: this is a searing anecdote of rage, terror and tragedy that’s hard to tear your eyes away from. With Brownstein’s wife, Mary, as a troubled female friend of Keith’s. 106m. (Ray Pride)

“Frownland” opens Friday at Facets.