Film
Monday, February 6, 2012
Posted
by Ben Sachs on
Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 4:42 PM
- Mattia Luigi Nappi/Wikimedia Commons
The four-screen movie house at 6746 N. Sheridan formerly known as the Village North
recently reopened in 2010 under new management and a new name. Despite receiving a substantial overhaul—which includes the introduction of a full bar to the concession stand—
the New 400 feels very much like the old Village North; it gives off a strong neighborhood vibe, making moviegoing feel like a natural part of urban social life. To emphasize its ties to the community, the theater has already pledged support to other businesses and charities in Rogers Park. Last week, I stopped by the theater to talk with manager Tom Klein (whose storied history involves managing the Vic Theatre and playing guitar with
Liquid Soul) and assistant manager Jenny Shapiro about movie exhibition, doorstops, and the plans for the second New 400 theater in Hyde Park. Our interview follows the jump.
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Tags: The New 400, Rogers Park, Village North, the Vic Theatre, Brew & View, Tom Klein, Jenny Shapiro, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Machete, film exhibition, 35-millimeter projection, digital projection, doorstops
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Posted
by J.R. Jones on
Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 1:00 PM
All this week I'll be reviewing the Oscar nominees for best live-action short, which open Friday at Landmark's Century Centre. Check back this time tomorrow for the next installment.
The best picture competition may be dominated by American movies (the only "foreign" titles nominated this year are Midnight in Paris, a Woody Allen movie, and The Artist, a silent movie set in Hollywood), but the race for best live-action short is decidedly more international, with entries from Ireland, Germany, and Norway. Directed by Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), the touching and funny drama The Shore follows an Irish expatriate (Ciaran Hinds) as he returns with his grown daughter (Kerry Condon) after 25 years in the United States; the visit unexpectedly reunites him with the woman he might have wed had he stayed (Maggie Cronin), who's now married to his best friend from the old days (Conleth Hill). This may sound like a staid premise, but the story is beautifully written and played, and George manages to capture the feel of an Irish folk tale not through narration or some other pointer but through his deft balancing of heartache and comedy (the sharpest scene is a hilarious misunderstanding by the sea as the two men finally meet again). A trailer follows the jump.
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Tags: 2012 Academy Awards, Landmark's Century Centre, Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen, The Artist movie, Terry George, Hotel Rwanda, Ciaran Hinds, Kerry Condon, Maggie Cronin, Conleth Hill, Irish films, short films, movies, Video
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Posted
by J.R. Jones on
Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 11:00 AM
All this week I'll be reviewing the Oscar nominees for best short animation, which open Friday at Landmark's Century Centre. Check back this time tomorrow for the next installment.
Of the four shorts I was able to see, my favorite by far was William Joyce and Brandon Oldenberg's charming fantasy The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. Produced by Moonbot Studios of Shreveport, Louisiana, this 15-minute computer piece follows a frankly Keaton-esque hero as a hurricane pulls his terraced hotel into the sky and whisks him away to a land where books fly around like gentle birds. The storm sequence that opens the short melds together the cyclone of The Wizard of Oz, with its characters floating in air, and the spinning house gag from Keaton's One Week. Once the hero is deposited in book land, however, the movie references begin to disappear and the short matures into a lovely story about the joy (and sadness) of spending a life in the library. Don't take my word for it; you can actually watch the entire thing after the jump.
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Tags: 2012 Academy Awards, Landmark's Century Centre, William Joyce, Brandon Oldenberg, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, Moonbot Studios, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, One Week, animation, movies, Video
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Friday, February 3, 2012
Posted
by Ben Sachs on
Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 5:37 PM
Three teenage boys in a Seattle suburb gain the powers of telekinesis and super strength after encountering a mysterious alien life force, but instead of using these gifts to fight crime, they direct them against familiar teen problems like loneliness and abusive parents. As pulp sci-fi this Fox release is pretty good, but it’s also commendable for its sensitive depiction of adolescent behavior: even the bullying scenes avoid the caricature of most studio films. The story takes the form of one boy’s video diary, and though the fake DIY aesthetic is used more imaginatively here than in
Cloverfield (2008), it still feels like a gimmick. Josh Trank directed a script by Max Landis (son of director John Landis).
Tags: Chronicle, Cloverfield, sci-fi, Josh Trank, Max Landis
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Posted
by J.R. Jones on
Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 5:10 PM
This above-average children’s drama from Universal manages to hit all the right notes as an inspirational story and provides a savvy, even cynical account of an international media event. In October 1988, as the Bush-Dukakis presidential campaign neared the finish line, three gray whales were discovered trapped beneath rapidly forming ice in the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska, and as the national networks converged, the rescue effort pulled in such disparate actors as Greenpeace, Eskimo whalers, an oil company, the U.S. defense department, and icebreaking ships from the Soviet Union. Screenwriters Jack Amiel and Michael Begler adapted Tom Rose’s nonfiction book
Freeing the Whales: How the Media Created the World’s Greatest Non-Event—the subtitle has been scrapped from the movie’s advertising, but the balance of sweetness and skepticism is what sets this apart. Ken Kwapis directed, making good use of John Krasinski, Drew Barrymore, Kristen Bell, Ted Danson, Dermot Mulroney, Kathy Baker, and Tim Blake Nelson. Trailer follows the jump.
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Tags: Universal Pictures, George H.W. Bush, Michael Dukakis, Beaufort Sea, Greenpeace, Soviet Union, Jack Amiel, Michael Begler, Tom Rose, Freeing the Whales: How the Media Created the World?s Greatest Non-Event, Ken Kwapis, John Krasinski, Drew Barrymore, Kristen Bell, Ted Danson, Dermot Mulroney, Kathy Baker, Tim Blake Nelson, children’s movies, Video
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Posted
by J.R. Jones on
Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 9:00 AM
- Heep big Indian brave Burt Reynolds in Navajo Joe (1966).
In the essay "Hamlet and His Problems," T.S. Eliot famously declared
Coriolanus to be Shakespeare's greatest play. I'm not about to wade into that swamp (David Haglund has already led the charge with an interesting piece in
Slate), but there's no question that
Coriolanus is a thorny, brilliant drama with plenty to tell us about the friction between democracy and military might. Ralph Fiennes's new movie adaptation, the subject of this week's
long review, opens Friday at Landmark's Century Centre.
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Tags: Hamlet and His Problems, Coriolanus, David Haglund, Ralph Fiennes, My Childhood, My Ain Folk, Bill Douglas, The Innkeepers, Ti West, The House of the Devil, My Piece of the Pie, Cedric Klapisch, When the Cat's Away, Navajo Joe, Burt Reynolds, Untamed Mikio Naruse, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Hideko Takamine, Windfall movie, The Woman in Black, Daniel Radcliffe, Rowland Brown, Blood Money, Dennis Hopper, The Last Movie, Robert Bresson, A Man Escaped, Mouchette, Bela Tarr, The Man From London, Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud, Persepolis, Billy Wilder, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Wes Anderson, The Royal Tenenbaums, John Huston, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Video
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Thursday, February 2, 2012
Posted
by Michael Miner on
Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 5:34 PM
- An old press pass for "A Black's View of the News"
Don Cornelius, the creator of Soul Train,
died Wednesday in California. Cornelius broke into television at WCIU, Channel 26, in Chicago in the late 60s, on
A Black's Views of the News. My friend Tom Weinberg recalls this was "the first nightly black news program in the country." Weinberg was the producer, his first job.
Weinberg, who's had a long career in independent video, is the creator of the Media Burn Independent Video Archive, an online museum full of astonishing stuff. He's just offered up these relics—to the left is an old press pass, and there's more after the jump.
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Tags: Don Cornelius, Soul Train, A Black's Views of the News, Tom Weinberg, Media Burn, FuzzyMemories.TV, WCIU, Video
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Posted
by Ben Sachs on
Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 11:18 AM
- From Bryan Wyrick's 10 Frames (My Dog Ate My Homework)
In the
interview I posted the other day, local video artist Nelson Carvajal spoke enthusiastically about what he termed “the democratization of filmmaking, [which is] bringing [things] to the point where everybody can be making art.” For an illustration of that sentiment, head to Andersonville on Friday night, where
Chicago Filmmakers will screen recent shorts by the local collaborative
Group 312 Films. The group, the Chicago chapter of
Group 101 Films, operates according to the dictum that each member must produce a three-to-five minute work every six months. As to be expected, the works vary in terms of quality, but they share a faith in art for art’s sake that seems increasingly practical in the democratic landscape Carvajal described.
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Tags: Chicago Filmmakers, Group 312 Films, Group 101 Films, Nelson Carvajal
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Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Posted
by J.R. Jones on
Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 3:15 PM
- Don Cornelius (left) interviews Curtis Mayfield on the Chicago set of Soul Train.
creator Don Cornelius died this morning of a gunshot wound, apparently self-inflicted, in his home in Encino, California. He was 75. If you've never read
Jake Austen's fine 2008 cover story on the early Chicago days of
Soul Train, do yourself a favor and check it out. There's also a jubilant hour-long documentary,
Soul Train: The Hippest Trip in America, that was broadcast on VH1 last year and screened theatrically at the Gene Siskel Film Center in September, with Cornelius taking questions afterward.
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Tags: Don Cornelius, Curtis Mayfield, Soul Train, Jake Austen, Soul Train: The Hippest Trip in America, VH1, Gene Siskel Film Center, dance programs, soul music, Video
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Posted
by Tony Adler on
Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 2:18 PM
My favorite steak house,
Gene & Georgetti, turned 70 in 2011, but the platinum jubilee seems to be leaking into 2012. Last Sunday G&G took over the Park West on Armitage for a big party, the centerpiece of which was the premiere of a movie about the restaurant, made by G&G family scion Michelle Durpetti.
There were antipasti and moviehouse candies available before the showing, slider-size sandwiches after (provided—rather sweetly, I thought—by friendly competitor Phil Stefani, who appears in the movie talking about how much he learned from G&G). At the buffet station, a guy carved slices of prosciutto that dropped onto a platter alongside crumbles of good aged cheese. When they weren't offering boxes of pop corn and bags of Swedish Fish or Twizzlers, servers brought drinks from the open bar.
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Tags: Gene and Georgetti, Michelle Durpetti, Tony Durpetti, Marion Durpetti, Park West, Phil Stefani, Rich Melman, Sid Luckman
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