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
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 »
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.”
RECOMMENDED
“I can see the end of my career,” Steven Soderbergh told a reporter for The Guardian, published July 14, shortly after the Brad Pitt-starring project “Moneyball” was cancelled three days before shooting was about to begin and millions had been spent. “I’ve had that sensation for a few years now. And so I’ve got a list of stuff that I want to do, that I hope I can do, and once that’s all finished I may just disappear.” What does that mean for his smaller recent projects, “Bubble” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” featured this week at Siskel, shot on HD with minimal cast and crew? If his Matt Damon comedy this fall, “The Informant!” doesn’t play well and his 3-D Cleopatra musical scored by Guided By Voices also gets the asp, would we see more movies like these? Or could he simply disappear? The improvisation methods of “TGE” lead in several interesting directions, as real-life sexual performer Sasha Grey plays a high-end call girl in modern-day Manhattan, performing opaquely, a dead-eyed analogue to Godard’s 1960s roles with bright-eyed, sad-eyed women as prostitutes? Soderbergh’s post-Godard profession landed coincidentally in the October 2008 money meltdown. The prostitute meets clueless men, from a personal-trainer boyfriend to a real-life magazine journalist to money-fretting clients to a critic (played with oleaginous ardor by film critic Glenn Kenny). The light is cold yet lucent. The framing is gorgeous yet obtuse. The story is elliptical. The ending is baffling. Yet increasingly questions of professional authenticity resound, as much as those of distanced emotions ever have, in Soderbergh’s later work. (Ray Pride)
RECOMMENDED
Steven Soderbergh directs, shoots and edits from a screenplay credited to Brian Koppelman and David Levien (“Rounders,” “Ocean’s 13″) that feels at times like an op-ed piece, in other places like occupational sociology, or like an investigative profile. But it’s mostly a fictional study of a young woman negotiating workplace and selfhood in Manhattan. Chelsea (Sasha Grey, a notorious young adult-film star making her non-adult film debut) is a self-employed escort living with her boyfriend who works as a personal trainer. He’s played by Chris Santos, a triathlete making his debut as well. Set across five days in October 2008, “The Girlfriend Experience” includes a lot of talk about the economy and upcoming presidential election. Read the rest of this entry »
By Ray Pride
The boundary between craft and crap can be fine: what one mind finds genially garish and gratifying gaudy, another will scent as trash from the get-go.
When Ole Bornedal’s “Just Another Love Story” (Kaerlighed pa film) debuted at Sundance 2008, it didn’t sound like something worth seeing while there, a Danish programmer at best. In a way, I’m glad I waited. Seeing it outside of a festival’s deadlines and overload, it stands out as beautifully crafted, vibrant, visceral horror-noir, a dangerously fragrant story of a man who witnesses death for a living and takes a treacherous leap into dreams of other lives.
Writer-director Bornedal opens with three brief, cryptic “love scenes,” each ominous in dark fashion, and moves quickly into the main story. Jonas (Anders W. Berthelsen) is a family man, a forensic photographer with an airless suburban life. One day, there’s a car crash, he’s at fault, leaving a young woman, Julia (Rebecka Hemse), in a coma. Visiting her in the hospital, Julia’s family takes him for a boyfriend she’d met in Hanoi whom they’ve never seen. Why not play the role? Life’s not that interesting. Why not descend into fantasy? Wife and friends react badly to misleading clues and cues: “Fuck feelings! Make up your mind!” a colleague tells him over a corpse in a morgue. But he can’t. The femme fatale he nearly killed transfixes him. And won’t the boyfriend show up with complications galore? So many complications it would spoil the fun to unravel them here.
One of 2008′s five highest-grossing films in Denmark, “Just” sounds in outline a lot like 1995′s Sandra Bullock-Bill Pullman-Peter Gallagher romantic roundelay “While You Were Sleeping.” (Another one of the things that made me initially reluctant to go.) But Bornedal’s interest lies less in plot (and emotion) than in sweeping, almost grandiloquent visual strokes, pulpy plot turns and fleet, assured editing between parallel perspectives and time frames. Busier but just as eerie as his 1994 film “Nightwatch” (which he remade in English in the U.S. in 1997 from a script co-written by Steven Soderbergh), “Just Another Love Story” is filled with dark pleasures, the kind of eye-filling treat that makes your eyelids tired from how many times they go wide.
While far more of a garish thriller than any work from Atom Egoyan, the interest in splintered time schemes parallels the Canadian director’s work, and the rich color schemes are as stylized as those of “Exotica” and “The Sweet Hereafter.” Letters and narration suggest the twining strands of a literary thriller. But Bornedal isn’t really an intellectual, compared to the ever-patterning Egoyan, and settles mostly for simple fun. Like last year’s surprise arthouse hit, the $6 million-grossing “Tell No One,” “Just Another Love Story” doesn’t shy away from adult fears and grown-up moments. Convolutions spiral, passions erupt into violence.
Asian film has gone through its phases (“J-Horror,” “K-Horror”) and “Grudge” and “Ring” remakes have come half-digested through the Hollywood studio python to finally decadent extremes. Many of the elements don’t transpose neatly from Asian cultures to the American one. Our legends are different. Grown-up passions that result in violence, revenge and retribution? Familiar enough to work on any turf.
In the past few years, along with a few samples from Spain like “Timecrimes” and “[REC],” the chilly reaches above Europe seem a new hope for waking nightmares, ranging from the bleak pleasures of Baltasar Kormakur’s Iceland-specific genetic shocker-murder mystery “Jar City” to the pre-teen vampires in Tomas Alfredson’s Swedish coming-of-age story, the gently poetic, fiercely quiet “Let The Right One In.” Bornedal fixes on sight, loss of sight and recurring memory. As of the first Scandinavian features to revel in the sustained possibilities of CGI, the results are suitably delirious; lurid, even. Fantastic images abound, such as a sustained scene of the effects of a tremendous car wreck: glass, snow, a woman’s shoulder-length brown hair, wind, the pull of gravity. There are skies, especially at water’s edge, that would give the painter J. M. W. Turner pause. Another scene: diamonds in rain spill like shatters of glass, like blood from a shooting victim. Richly planned and designed, the shot, like “Just Another Love Story,” is as cold as the human heart.
“Just Another Love Story” opens Friday at the Music Box.
RECOMMENDED 
Steven Soderbergh’s attitude toward his biography of the two most significant passages in the life of Che Guevara as an Argentine doctor transformed into guerilla fighter—Cuba, Bolivia—is that a movie on such a freighted, fraught subject that did not offend one set of bystanders or another wouldn’t be very good at all. What he’s done is create two distinctly different movies (which were once, post-Cannes, pre-Toronto, two movies called “The Argentine” and “Guerilla”) with a fierce central performance (by Benicio del Toro), which deal with the process of social transformation, one successful in its moment, the other a failure and fatal. At one point in the years it took this approach to make it to the screen, Terence Malick was slated to direct. Soderbergh compares the poetic, jungle-mad version Malick might have crafted to his own style, with the two films we have now as “a blunt instrument.” Shot with a prototype digital video camera that was in his hands for only hours before going to South America, Soderbergh as director, cinematographer and camera operator does amazing things: the textures of the visual style derive from documentary but have their own fresh way with surface; the intimacy of the camerawork is tactile even in the moments of disenchantment, and his decision to keep Che within groupings in the frame—in a social context, within the struggle, within the battles, let’s say—rather than isolated as a singular protagonist, as a “hero” on his personal “journey,” which would be the fashion in a conventional American film biography, is canny and key. Too much cannot be said about Alberto Iglesias’ remarkable, beautiful score, which provides emotional undercurrent and patches of mood to sometimes-austere passages. The politics? Viewers will bring their own. “Che”‘s takeaway? Process works until it doesn’t. Transformative intelligence persists. The rest of us die or are killed. And Del Toro? Si. Si. Si. (Ray Pride)
“Che: Special Roadshow Edition” opens Friday at Landmark Century, commercial- and trailer-free, with souvenir booklet and a thirty-minute intermission. Soderbergh and I talk about the use of the prototype RED camera here.
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
The comeback of Minnie Driver! (Who knew she’d ever been here?) Life used to be a cabaret, but now it’s an intersection, my friend. In the atrocious, oppressive slab of unearned miserablism written and directed by Charles Oliver, “Take,” Driver’s Ana, a single mother of a developmentally disabled boy, crosses paths with a loser, Saul (Jeremy Renner, “28 Weeks Later,” “The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford”) and they live their lives in parallel tracks of redemption and crime. Working in a visual style devolved from both Soderbergh and Gonzalez Inarritu, Oliver’s confused editing is matched by his confounding apparent empathy for both murderers and the amply deluded. Even more than what’s stashed and moldering in Ana’s trunk, the ending is horseshit. 99m. Widescreen. (Ray Pride)