Brendt Barbur/Photo: Wilis Johnson

As the first brush of warm weather tempts Chicagoans out of their dens, a film festival celebrating bikes and riders returns to town starting February 25 to touch off the cycling season. The Bicycle Film Festival (bicyclefilmfestival.com) rings in its tenth anniversary with a bevy of films showcasing all things bicycle, from urban cycling to bike polo to BMX. The festival’s director, Brendt Barbur, created the event as a way to champion the urban bicycling movement after getting hit by a bus while riding his bike in 2000. Since then the festival has toured more than thirty cities from Taipei to Toronto, drawing more than 300,000 participants annually. The Viaduct Theater plays host to this year’s incarnation, screening some forty films. Highlights include “The Birth of Big Air,” a Spike Jonze-produced documentary about the triumphs and tribulations of legendary BMX biker Mat Hoffman; “Lucas Brunelle: Line of Sight,” which brings hair-raising urban cycling to the screen with helmet-cam footage of urban biking icon Lucas Brunelle’s adventures; and “Riding the Long White Cloud,” about a group of professional skateboarders who cycle around New Zealand’s beautiful North Island camping and skating as they go. Parties at Beauty Bar and Darkroom bookend the fest with music provided by DJs Pogo, Arturo and DJ Brad Owen. There’s even a free bike valet at all screenings courtesy of Active Transportation Alliance. Barbur says the festival offers a glimpse into “a biking movement that is rapidly emerging all around the world.” But non-bikers are welcome too. “People might think that BFF is just for bikers, but the films are strong on their own. It’s all about having a good time, and it’s okay to drive a car to the festival.” (Benjamin Rossi)

Top 5 U.S. Films
“The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow
“The Limits of Control,” Jim Jarmusch
“A Serious Man,” Joel and Ethan Coen
“Two Lovers,” James Gray
“The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Wes Anderson
—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Films
“Summer Hours,” Olivier Assayas
“The Headless Woman,” Lucrecia Martel
“35 Shots of Rum,” Claire Denis
“You, the Living,” Roy Andersson
“Night and Day,” Hong Sang-soo
—Ray Pride Read the rest of this entry »

By Tom Lynch

50. “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” Shane Black, 2005

49. “In America,” Jim Sheridan, 2002

48. “The Lives of Others,” Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006

47. “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo del Toro, 2006

46. “Best in Show,” Christopher Guest, 2000

45. “Michael Clayton,” Tony Gilroy, 2007

44. “The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan, 2008 Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Adaptation is translation, reducing, expanding, conflating, destructing, reconstructing, smashing, dashing, bowling, bawling, making personal what already was, what always was.

In a brief ninety minutes or so, if you discount the end credits, Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers’ adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s nine-sentence 1963 illustrated children’s book captures the sensation of a child’s head, buzzing as with bees, filled with parts yet to be connected and potential yet to be explored and acted upon and lived up to. It’s the opposite of the usual studio-film obstacle of attempting to compress a 500-page novel into the confines of a traditional feature film length.

The result is a “wild rumpus” throughout, to use a phrase from the story. The events are episodic, resulting in an elliptical character, a scattiness, that’s slightly disconcerting in the theater, yet the morning-after taste that’s left is rich with the sensation of febrile, pre-hormonal surges of imagination yet to find its flowering. Read the rest of this entry »

Film festivals are retrenching around the world as economies contract and sponsorships dwindle. The Chicago Underground Film Festival’s 2008 edition ran in late October, just as the financial crisis began, at a venue that was difficult to get to by public transportation, during an Indian summer heat wave, opening on the closing night of Chicago International, which also was the night of Barack Obama’s primetime infomercial, just a week before the election. The results were disappointing. But a move to September this year, at the Loop-located Siskel Film Center promises better things. Festival director Bryan Wendorf is optimistic. “The economy didn’t really impact the number of films submitted. The quality, as always, ran the gamut from awful to brilliant but there was plenty to look at and choose from.”

Trends emerge during programming. “I never look to program around a predetermined theme, but once the films and videos are chosen patterns emerge,” Wendorf says. “This year there seems to be a lot of work dealing with ideas about place, home and globalization. Some of the work, like Lucy Raven’s experimental documentary ‘China Town’ deals with this in a very conscious and direct way while other works address these issues from more oblique angles.” Another trend is for work on digital video to exploit its own textures rather than pretending it’s the same as film. “Video is almost infinitely malleable. But the festival has never set out to be a ‘new media’ showcase and we are still seeing great work on 16mm and 35mm.”

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By Ray Pride

Duncan Jones’ first feature is a muscular feat of the mind, compacting a myriad of movie influences into a feat of concentration, and for Sam Rockwell, a tour-de-force performance.

It’s almost impossible to talk about the film without revealing what in other films would be a twist but in the $5-million-budgeted “Moon” is its raison d’etre. Trailers, posters and interviews have all pretty much given away the game, which doesn’t hurt this small gem at all. Alone on the far side of the moon, Sam Bell is a miner capturing Helium-3, which has become Earth’s primary source of energy. He’s weeks away from the end of his three-year contract with Lunar Industries. But he’s also getting headaches, hallucinations, failing to focus. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Tarsem Singh’s voluptuous second feature (after the hermetic “The Cell”) was made around the world, with scenes grabbed in exotic locales while he made mega-budget commercials. A narrative within a narrative, “The Fall,” the framing story, set in a California hospital in the 1920s, finds a bed-bound stuntman (Lee Pace) telling fantastical stories to a young emigrant girl (round-faced Romanian Catinca Untaru). The child’s non-acting is appealing; Pace’s bad acting is not. But the flights of fancy include imagery of rare beauty, at once concrete and lyrical. (Note the perspective on a swimming elephant, from just beneath its gently kicking legs against the blue-on-blue surface of water lit by sky.) “The Fall,” finished in 2006, is only now finding a release with a presentation credit from his commercial-making colleagues Spike Jonze and David Fincher, but the exuberant extravagance of Tarsem’s tableaux is timeless. The narrative’s misshapen but the filmmaking is powerful. The ending, however, is anathema, in which a supposed tribute to silent movies is depicted in tragically awful transfers, in the wrong ratio and in the sped-up fashion familiar from television in decades past but utterly unlike what was witnessed by the first audiences for these films. The suggestion that the character did several of Buster Keaton’s stunts also reeks. Based on the 1981 Bulgarian film, “Yo Ho Ho.” 117m. (Ray Pride)

By Ray Pride

“Be Kind Rewind,” Michel Gondry’s second feature as solo writer-director, is a shambling and idiosyncratic comedy, set in a parallel universe of a rundown Passaic, New Jersey, where old ideas die hard.
Danny Glover runs a video store, still dedicated to VHS, in a rundown inner-city corner building where Fats Waller was reputedly born; Mos Def plays a clerk whose paranoid friend (Jack Black) manages to electrify himself during one of his foolish ventures and erase the store’s inventory. Solution? Do remakes starring themselves, and eventually the community (including made-for-movies Melonie Diaz, at once cartoon and vital beauty). Bubbling and bristling on the surface, with a quiet wallop of an ending that seems at once utopian and elegiac, “Be Kind Rewind” essentially suggests there is no future for mass cinema. “I would be the first one out of a job if there were no movies or commercials, but I would not miss them,” Gondry says to me at the end of one spiraling disquisition. In a couple of conversations before its Sundance 2008 debut, and reading other interviews, I discover the endlessly inventive director almost never repeats himself (except to say, “Just let me have my concept” regarding the VHS). We continue with the topic of movies made with and for only one’s friends. Philosophically, “Be Kind” seems to be about how each individual finds a way to tell that story, even if only to friends on the block.
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