By Ray Pride

Sometimes as a movie clicks along, it feels like it’s advertising a movie that doesn’t exist. It’s a mood or a moment the filmmakers gesture toward, but never reach. Weirdly, Morgan Spurlock’s latest self-described “doc-buster” is almost literally a coming attraction for itself, as he moves into the world of product placement in movies and television and attempts to finance his film entirely that way, with his successes and rebuffs making up the meat of his movie. But when the process produces a product that will be promoted by twenty-three sponsors… You get “POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” which is easily the funniest movie he’s made.

Spurlock didn’t get A-list actors, but he did get Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky (he sells shoes to Nader and puts a bottle of Pom in front of Chomsky), and directors Quentin Tarantino, J. J. Abrams, Brett Ratner and Peter Berg. One of the subtle strengths of “Greatest” is the settings where he interviews his subjects: Tarantino with all of Hollywood below him, Ratner in a comfortably appointed home a super-rich dowager would love, intoning “Artistic integrity, whatever.” Read the rest of this entry »

Chicago has the good fortune of regular archival programming at Siskel, Facets and the Music Box, but another venue’s slipping a sleek program into the mix starting this weekend. As part of Italics, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s survey of Italian art of the past forty years (running until February 14), eight films will be shown in glorious 35mm, including Visconti’s “The Damned,” Pasolini’s “Decameron,” Antonioni’s “The Passenger,” and little-known Bertolucci and Rosi. Gwen Infusino, Curatorial Administrative Assistant at the MCA, worked on the series. “In curatorial discussions, I had a tendency to compare everything to films, so it was exciting when this project came up.” She began with a list of 100 or so films; except for wild-card “Inglorious Bastards” (pictured) the 1978 inspiration for Tarantino’s latest, they came from that list. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Stately, plump Mark Whitacre bounds through the frame within the frames of rooms in hotels and corporate offices in “The Informant!” like a man whose racing thoughts propel him ever forward, his near-pompadour of hair ever upward.

In Steven Soderbergh’s lovingly batshit comedy about corporate conspiracy and whistle-blowing at Midwestern agricultural combine Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in the 1990s, the storytelling moves at a velocity past a couple of the “Oceans” movies, along with a voice-over of comic static from biochemist and corporate vice-president Whitacre’s (Matt Damon) head. Seemingly outraged by the liberties taken by his bosses, Whitacre becomes a mole for the FBI in what appears to be a price-fixing setup with Japanese competitors in the market for lysine, an amino acid derived from corn. Sounds deadly dull? Not for a second. “The Informant!” plays like an ADD edition of “The Insider,” everything that would possibly be glum imbued with a rosy, optimistic, hopeful charge. Whitacre’s brain crackles with non-sequiturs; his inability to focus at any given moment is what makes the movie both strange and eccentrically funny. While this reportedly under-$25 million comedy may be described by some as a straightforward movie by the experimentally minded Soderbergh, it may be his most cracked, fractured film since “Schizopolis.” It’s high-fructose mania. Overlapping, contradicting, questioning, reassuring, it makes you wonder for the man’s sanity almost immediately. Read the rest of this entry »

Quentin Tarantino has a cold.

I get the call a couple hours before a scheduled interview. It’s past Newcity’s print deadline and only a couple days before “Inglourious Basterds” opens on thousands of screens. Tarantino will walk the “rope line” on the red carpet of the Chicago International Film Festival premiere, but a fistful of interviews are called off. His flight is late; he’s not feeling up to it.

Modestly refigured since its Cannes premiere, Tarantino’s World War II revenge fantasy has a large cast and an intricate, implausible plot that would take long paragraphs to recount. Here are two words: “Kill Schicklgruber.” A covert team of American soldiers, led by Brad Pitt, who tag themselves with the film’s title, are an integral part of a plot to kill Hitler and propaganda master and film producer Joseph Goebbels at a premiere at a Parisian cinema, joined by British soldiers and French Resistance fighters inspired by a Jewish woman, Shoshanna (the dreamily wet-eyed Mélanie Laurent) who owns the cinema and has a history with the film’s lead character, Hans Landa, known as “The Jew Hunter,” a multilingual interrogator who is not only everyone’s antagonist but a brutal yet suave killer who’s earned his name. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

The Music Box and IFC offer canny  counter-programming to this week’s wide release of Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” a historical revenge fantasy about World War II resistance in a mythical France, by offering “Flame & Citron,” Ole Christian Madsen’s crisp, efficient thriller, based on fact, about resistance to the Nazi invaders in Denmark in 1944.

“When your nation is invaded you have to make very important decisions. What do you chose?” is Madsen’s simplest declaration of what his film is about. The themes are timeless and painfully timely: think Tehran. “Flame” and “Citron” were the code names for two resistance fighters, 23-year-old Bent (Thure Lindhardt) and 33-year-old Jørgen (Mads Mikkelsen, seen previously in “Pusher” and “Casino Royale”). Flame, with notably fiery hair, wants to launch armed counterattacks against the occupying forces. Citron, Flame’s driver, and a family man, becomes more and more involved in the clandestine activities. Things go wrong, loyalties are questioned, deeper moral issues are sketched in. The script’s psychological observation is acute and Madsen’s command of dynamic action filmmaking is gratifying. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“Breaking News” from Variety on my phone on the 66 home: John Hughes dead at 59. Eyes sting a little and immediately I remember the Simple Minds lyrics, “Don’t you forget about me, no, no, no,” heard in “The Breakfast Club.” John Hughes, the man, had been all but forgotten as a briefly prolific filmmaker (eight features in eight years, thirty-five-plus script credits), but the movies, the lines of dialogue, comic and observational, and yes, the songs, they’re stuck in an impressively expansive collective brain.

. . .

Five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks and loose pages spilled across the surface of the desk. “These are his pages,” the woman offering me the sudden urgent weekend task said. “What you have to do is take all these typed pages and make sure they match up to the pages on the disk,” compiled in a now-defunct, now-obscure word-processing program, “and you have to be careful not to change anything. John doesn’t like anyone changing things. A comma, a word. We just need a working copy for the production office.” I looked at one of the several front pages. “Uncle Buck.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Sukiyaki Western Django” is better than average but far from wholesome Takashi Miike gallimaufry, taking on the epic transposition of the derivativeness of the spaghetti western, notably Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars” and Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” to a period Japanese setting and also tangling with Quentin Tarantino’s substantial ego and infinitesimal talent as an actor. Gun-slinging, bloodletting and terrible dialogue ensue. The title is gibberish, the movie’s nonsense, and it’s a gratifying eyeful of action craft throughout to those predisposed to such knowing nonsense and don’t mind a little repetition in their widescreen bloodbaths. In subtitled English, a joke that wears thin. With Koichi Sato, Yosuke Iseya, Hideaki Ito, Kaori Momoi. 120m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Ray Pride) 

When Quentin Tarantino gets a “presents” billing or a “producer” credit these days, flashback to “Pulp Fiction” or “Kill Bill” rather than see what he’s branding now: a biker film overkilled with genre in-jokes and hipsterish quips about nihilism, sex-istentialism and Marcel Proust in a dusty dive called Dani’s Inferno. Producer-writer-director-actor Larry Bishop plays Pistolero, a biker chieftain on a mission to do right by a woman that rival bikers tied to a chair, stabbed, shot and burned alive in 1976 as her son watched. Thirty-two years later a new biker with no past rolls on to the scene. Betrayers are betrayed. Assassins shoot arrows. Rococo exchanges include a reminder for a rendezvous set for Inn Six on Route Six at six in the morning: “Are you going to tell me six more times? A child of six could remember that.” One gang is the 666′ers. There’s a line about a “666 cc. psycho-symphony” and three keys numbered “666″ will open a mysterious box buried in the desert. Black leather and bloodshed abound. The score is twang-full. Disposable po-mo menthol. With Michael Madsen, Eric Balfour, Vinnie Jones, David Carradine, Laura Cayouette and Dennis Hopper. 85m. (Bill Stamets)