Film
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Things I Love Weekly Top Five Film Weekly Top Five: Roman Polanski films
Posted by Drew Hunt on 01.13.13 at 09:00 AM
The Roman Polanski film Tess (1979) screens in a digital print this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center, a reportedly lush version of a film known for its sensuous imagery. I'm eager to take a gander myself, as I hope others are as well—your next (and last) opportunity to see it is tomorrow, Mon 1/14, 6 PM.
It goes without saying that Polanski is a controversial figure. However, his prior transgressions aside, he remains one of my very favorite directors. I greatly admire his elegance as a filmmaker, the sophistication he shows even when dealing in decidedly uncomfortable and otherwise lurid subject matter. The following are my five favorite films of his, and I welcome any and all counterarguments.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Foreign Film Two French filmmakers overrated by middlebrows and underrated by cineastes
Posted by Ben Sachs on 01.12.13 at 09:00 AM
In a neat coincidence, the restored print of Claude Sautet's Max et les Ferrailleurs comes into town just after Doc Films started its Louis Malle series, which continues every Tuesday night through mid-March. This seems fitting, as the careers of Malle and Sautet overlap in a number of ways. Both had formative experiences as assistant directors; Malle assisted Robert Bresson on A Man Escaped, and Sautet graduated to directing his first crime film, Classe Tous Risques, after assisting on similar features throughout the 1950s. In the 60s both men employed stylistic devices (location shooting, jump cuts, direct sound) as well as actors (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jeanne Moreau) associated with the French New Wave, though neither considered himself a member of that movement. By the following decade both had settled into relatively conservative modes of filmmaking, privileging character over style and dealing mainly with middle- or upper-class subjects. They even released their final films—Vanya on 42nd Street and Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud—about a year apart, in 1994 and 1995, respectively.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Gross This Will Kill You Moviegoing Film Politics Gangster Squad is the most violent Hollywood movie in . . . two weeks
Posted by J.R. Jones on 01.11.13 at 03:05 PM
I'm away in Los Angeles, and for the past ten days I've been driving around under giant billboards counting down the days until joy returns to the land with Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad. It's the sort of frantic, out-of-proportion PR blitz that ensues when moviemakers realize they have a serious problem—in this case, that their brain-dead celebration of machine gun fire debuts amid a national debate on automatic weapons. Gangster Squad already has a history of being outflanked by events: the original release date was pushed back, and the movie recut, after the July 20 massacre at a multiplex in Aurora, Colorado, cast an unfortunate light on the movie's scene of characters firing from behind a movie screen into the audience. It's a pretty potent symbol for the debate that will (or should) ensue in the wake of the latest bloodbath: whether movies can kill.
Opening Film The birth of cinema verite, and the rest of this week's movies
Posted by Ben Sachs on 01.11.13 at 07:33 AM
Starting Sunday the Gene Siskel Film Center begins a partial retrospective of the films of Jean Rouch, the great French documentarian responsible for coining the term cinema verité and for inspiring the young filmmakers who would come to be identified as the French New Wave. The series begins with one of Rouch's best works, the 1961 feature Chronicle of a Summer, codirected with the ethnographer Edgar Morin. The film is founded on a simple premise: the directors stop random Parisians on the street and ask them whether or not they're happy. With this modest setup, Rouch and Morin initiate a probing sociological study of postwar France and a moving character study to boot. If you've never seen this before, do whatever you can to catch one of the two screenings.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Film Coming soon to the Reader movie listings . . .
Posted by Ben Sachs on 01.10.13 at 06:43 AM
Yesterday morning the California-based theater chain ArcLight Cinemas announced plans to construct a 14-screen movie theater near the North and Clybourn Red Line station, with an opening scheduled for late summer of 2014. The multiplex will be part of New City, a development project that will include a shopping center and a skyscraper with 190 apartment units. According to an official press release, the theater will include all the features of ArcLight's southern California locations, such as reserved seating, a full bar, and a strict no-talking policy during movies. The chain makes a point of showing classics as well as contemporary releases (the website mentions upcoming screenings of A Streetcar Named Desire and Blue Velvet at its Hollywood venue). Between the Music Box, Doc Films, the Gene Siskel Film Center, and the late-night programming at the Landmark Century and the Logan, Chicago isn't bereft of revival screenings. But it will be nice to have them near Old Town, which has been cinema-deprived since the closing of the Village and Pipers Alley theaters.
This news comes just before the reopening of Hyde Park's historic Harper Theater as a first-run cinema. The management—which also runs the New 400 Theater in Rogers Park—recently announced on its Twitter feed that they plan to hold their first screening on Friday, January 18. Designed to be a community center as well as a movie theater, the restored Harper will feature a sizable cafe in its lobby and the management has expressed interest in "assist[ing] our nonprofit neighbors with their fundraising efforts."
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Film Strategic film command, past and present
Posted by Ben Sachs on 01.08.13 at 11:41 AM
In one ring of the media circus surrounding Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, journalists and politicians alike have taken issue with Bigelow and cowriter Mark Boal's relationship with the CIA in preparing the film. A few days ago Tina Daunt noted in the Hollywood Reporter that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has launched a probe into whether the CIA granted the filmmakers inappropriate access to information. Yet intimate relationships between Hollywood and government agencies are hardly new. In his 2011 history An Army of Phantoms, critic J. Hoberman describes how major films of the early cold-war era were made with the collaboration (and often the editorial say-so) of the agencies they depicted.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Moviegoing Film Lawrence of Arabia versus Tess: Looking up and looking around
Posted by Ben Sachs on 01.07.13 at 04:19 PM
I was satisfied to see how well the DCP (Digital Cinema Package) restoration of Roman Polanski's Tess, which screens next weekend at the Gene Siskel Film Center, preserves the texture of the film's cinematography. Shot on Panavision equipment at a time when it yielded particularly grainy images (think of Robert Altman's Nashville or Polanski's own Chinatown), Tess has a rough and speckled beauty like that of an old stone. The look is a perfect fit for Polanski's portrait of late-19th-century England, which avoids the pageantlike splendor of traditional historical epics and offers the spectator a plausible abundance of dirt, faded clothes, and asymmetrical compositions. As is often the case in the director's work, the movie's tied to the perspective of a social outcast who regards brutish conditions as a fact of life and proper society as alien. The granular images, which sometimes appear to be crumbling from within, reinforce this point of view; by contrast, the photography of latter-day Polanski films, no matter how good, seems a little too solid.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Weekly Top Five Film Weekly Top Five: Most anticipated films for 2013
Posted by Drew Hunt on 01.06.13 at 12:00 PM
Although I'm still processing many films that were released in 2012, there seem to be just as many that I'm looking forward to in the coming year. Many seasoned filmmakers are back with new work, while more than a couple are churning up projects that are either direct sequels or at least bear a striking resemblance to previous efforts.
It's impossible to anticipate an entire year's worth of films, so consider this list incomplete. I welcome you to share any and all oversights, so that our moviegoing radars ensure nothing is overlooked. Here's to a fruitful 2013 in film!
Friday, January 4, 2013
This Will Kill You Film Four evil eyes in Winchester '73 and The Paperboy
Posted by Ben Sachs on 01.04.13 at 05:13 PM
There's a terrifying moment near the end of Winchester '73, which screened last night at the Gene Siskel Film Center, in which James Stewart's Lin McAdam threatens to strangle a man to death. Dan Duryea's Waco Johnny Dean may have had it coming to him—he's a rapist and murder even viler than Dutch Henry Brown, the gunman Stewart's been tracking for years. But when Stewart chokes Duryea, his eyes glare like those of a violent animal who's captured his prey. The most sympathetic portrayer in movies of the American everyman taps into a primitive, murderous instinct, and he does it so naturally as to suggest it's been in him all along.
Opening Film Controversy in action, and the rest of this week's movies
Posted by Ben Sachs on 01.04.13 at 12:28 PM
Riding into town on a wave of controversy, Kathryn Bigelow's fictionalized account of the CIA's hunt for Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, opens in Chicago this weekend. A number of politicians and political journalists have accused the film of factual inaccuracies, with some going so far as to say the film glorifies torture. While acknowledging the debate, J.R. Jones recommends the film in this week's issue, praising Bigelow for confronting "the darkest currents of American military might." I haven't seen it yet myself, though I'd contend that anything by the director of Near Dark and Strange Days is worth seeing for Bigelow's masterful control of pacing, physical detail, and tension. But if you like your suspense films a bit further removed from current events, hey, Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour is playing at Doc Films on Thursday.
