Moviegoing
Monday, January 21, 2013
On Video Transportation Moviegoing Film Cosmopolis and the incredible shrinking theater
Posted by Ben Sachs on 01.21.13 at 04:00 PM
One way that David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis improves upon the Don DeLillo source novel is that it balances DeLillo's cerebral prose with an exacting sense of corporeality. The stretch limo in which much of the book (and even more of the movie) takes place is an impossible space—and seeing it rather than imagining it makes one better appreciate the brilliance of the conceit. Eric Packer's 22-foot-long chassis is decked with monitors that feed him information about anything he could possibly want to know; the dialogue, which blithely mentions trips to Arizona, Kazakhstan, and European villas, heightens the feeling that this car somehow contains the whole world. A symbol of outsize consumption and godlike omniscience, Packer's ride is also eerily claustrophobic. Compared to the controlled inside environment, any outside phenomenon seems profoundly unreal. Cronenberg's framing constantly reminds you that Packer and his rotating guests are boxed inside the vehicle, granting comparable amounts of the frame to the ceiling or tinted windows as to faces.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Dim the Lights Moviegoing Film Attending a program of animated shorts with a room full of small children
Posted by Ben Sachs on 01.14.13 at 04:00 PM
I sat in the back row of the Facets Cinematheque for Saturday morning's program of animated shorts, the first in a monthly series aimed at families with small children. As one of only two childless adults in the room, I thought the smartest choice would be to keep out of sight. In retrospect I should have chosen the second-to-last row; about halfway through the program a one-year-old, taking what appeared to be some of her first steps, set her sights on my aisle seat as the finish line for her wobbly trek from the front of the house. I was in the bathroom when she set out; she was in my chair when I returned, her mother sitting on the floor next to her and giving her a valedictory patting. I didn't ask for my seat back.
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.
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.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Moviegoing Film Music Movies for your ears, 2012 edition
Posted by Ben Sachs on 12.17.12 at 04:00 PM
Since it came out a few weeks ago, I've listened to Scott Walker's Bish Bosch several times, almost always with friends and at top volume. I tend to be a headphone enthusiast (when the listening experience is that private, I feel like I'm disappearing into music the way I do with works of literature), but Walker's records feel most impactful when they're able to fill an entire room. Walker has long expressed affinities with cinema, and this is less evident in his references to particular films (Scott 4, from 1969, begins with a song about Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal) than in the imagistic quality of his arrangements. In his recordings, you can practically visualize the space between instruments or sections of an orchestra—it's not just the notes that matter, but the impeccable sense of mise-en-scene.
Monday, December 10, 2012
Dim the Lights Moviegoing LGBT Film What makes for a good introduction to a film screening?
Posted by Ben Sachs on 12.10.12 at 03:34 PM
I'm excited to hear Reader writer emeritus Fred Camper introduce a program of four avant-garde classics at the Film Center tomorrow at 6 PM. The screening marks the last of Camper's three-month film-and-lecture series on American cinema of the 1950s, which has provided me plenty of food for thought. Some of the works in the series, like Rebel Without a Cause, are revived fairly often, but Camper has a way of making any movie seem new. A noted scholar of experimental film, Camper talks about movies with an emphasis on universal formal properties—focal lengths, the arrangement of objects within a frame, editing patterns, and so on—which has the effect of making every film seem like an experimental film. (When he introduced Some Came Running a few weeks ago, he compared Vincente Minnelli's mise-en-scene to a Marshall Field's window display, encouraging the audience to approach the movie without expectations of realism.) It should be a treat to hear him expound on his area of expertise.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Gross Poverty Moviegoing Film Smell-o-vision replaces television?!
Posted by Ben Sachs on 12.03.12 at 06:00 PM
Have you ever walked past a group of young adults sitting on a busy sidewalk, dressed in rags, looking (and usually smelling) unwashed, and weren't sure whether they were homeless or just art students? This happens to me whenever there's nice weather in Chicago, as the Gene Siskel Film Center is next to the dorms of the School of the Art Institute. And I'm relieved whenever I see one of those kids enter the theater—it means they probably aren't struggling with homelessness.
Then again, homeless people love the movies too, though they tend to go most often when the weather is bad. I learned this first-hand from a regular at the soup kitchen where I volunteered in the second half of 2005 (Wedding Crashers had come out during a heat wave, I remember, and he'd seen it several times in its first week); during a stint of unemployment the following winter, I spotted a few homeless regulars at most of the weekday matinees I attended. At a screening of Terrence Malick's The New World, I was a few seats away from a jittery old man who sat with a bag of old newspaper on his lap and spent much of the movie muttering to himself. Roughly ten minutes into the film, he urinated in the aisle. I still don't know if this was because he hated The New World or because he liked it so much he didn't want to leave the auditorium.
Monday, November 26, 2012
Moviegoing Film Visual Art Tron, in 70-millimeter and in your head
Posted by Ben Sachs on 11.26.12 at 06:00 PM
For me, the most fascinating part of the 70-millimeter print of Tron that the Music Box screened this weekend was the distinct look of the actors' faces and hands. As I learned later from the movie's IMDB trivia page, the "computer world" sequences were shot on black-and-white 65-millimeter film, printed on high-contrast Kodalith sheet film, and then shone through with colored light before effects teams added the pioneering CGI effects frame by frame. Has any other movie employed this process? I can't think of anything else shot in black-and-white 65-millimeter—in fact, I was surprised to learn that the stock ever existed, as 65-millimeter is all but synonymous with colorful spectacle (like West Side Story and Jacques Tati's Playtime, both of which will screen in the Music Box's 70-millimeter series this February). That's too bad, as it looks extraordinary when projected; there's a hyperreal definition to both human features and the shadows around them. The people look like monuments—just seeing them move is breathtaking.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Moviegoing Film Thinking inside the box; or, Academy fight song
Posted by Ben Sachs on 11.19.12 at 06:00 PM
Last night the folks at Northwest Chicago Film Society proudly asserted that they were projecting Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park in its correct aspect ratio of 1.37:1 for the first time in Chicago. I hadn't seen the film since it played at the Landmark Century in 2008, where it was projected in the less boxy—and far more common—ratio of 1.85:1. My memories of the film weren't all that vivid, and I didn't recall responding strongly to it one way or the other. Revisiting Paranoid as an experiment in Academy ratio framing turned it into a new experience, and a pretty satisfying one at that. Van Sant's bisected compositions (like the early, Rothko-esque shots of the young hero walking across a field toward the Pacific Ocean, the bottom half of the screen all green-brown grass and the upper half all blue-gray water and sky) felt especially impactful in the more squarish frame, as did the close-up shots, which presented entire faces with barely any negative space around them.
Monday, November 12, 2012
Theater Moviegoing Film It's a clown's world in Holy Motors, Life Without Principle, and Pierre Étaix
Posted by Ben Sachs on 11.12.12 at 06:00 PM
Watching Trap Door Theatre's production of The Arsonists on Saturday night, I realized that I would be looking at clowns all weekend. The night before, I had revisited Leos Carax's circuslike Holy Motors—a film constructed around Denis Lavant's acrobatic and cartoonishly made-up lead performance—and the following afternoon I had plans to see Pierre Étaix play a clown in Yoyo at the Siskel Center. How refreshing it was to read Thomas Mann on the train between shows (I'm currently working my way through "Death in Venice" and Seven Other Stories) and get some much-needed seriousness in my life.
Then again, The Arsonists demonstrated how clowning could be serious business too. I learned from the program that the show's director, Paris-based theater artist Victor Quezada-Perez, had made it his mission to "promote the work of artists through clowning" and to "combat totalitarianism through poetry and art." That may sound highfalutin, but what could be further removed from totalitarian authority than a clown? By exaggerating his gestures and, by extension, the emotions behind them to the point of absurdity, a good clown can cut through the uniform seriousness around certain subjects and encourage us to think about them differently. The Arsonists, in which all the characters are portrayed as clowns, considers nothing less than the makeup of society in general. In his program notes the show's dramaturge cites a key line of dialogue delivered by one of the homeless men who upsets the bourgeois household that takes him in: "If the thought of radical change scares you more than the thought of disaster, what can you do to stop the disaster?"
