Opening
Friday, January 18, 2013
Opening Film A neglected Chicago filmmaker gets his due, and the rest of this week's screenings
Posted by Ben Sachs on 01.18.13 at 07:27 AM
In this week's issue, Drew Hunt writes at length about the 1958 western Gunman's Walk and its director, the underrated B-movie maverick (and Chicago native) Phil Karlson. Hunt explores the themes of antiracism and antiviolence in Karlson's 50s films, arguing that the filmmaker should be considered, pace Andrew Sarris, a subject for further research. Gunman's Walk screens on Monday at 7:30 PM at the Portage theater; it's just one of many great revivals in town this week. The embarrassment of riches includes the continuing Jean Rouch retrospective at the Gene Siskel Film Center (up this Sunday afternoon: Moi, un Noir and The Lion Hunters), All About Eve at the Music Box on Saturday and Sunday morning, and author Walter Mosley introducing the film adaptation of his Devil in a Blue Dress at the Cultural Center tonight at 7 PM. And it's a hell of a week at Doc Films, with the Coen brothers' Raising Arizona on Friday, David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis on Saturday and Sunday, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past on Monday, Louis Malle's Zazie in the Metro on Tuesday, Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild on Wednesday, and Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry on Thursday.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Opening Film Arnold Schwarzenegger's cartoonish comeback, by way of South Korea
Posted by Ben Sachs on 01.17.13 at 06:47 AM
Making his Hollywood debut, South Korean director Kim Jee-woon (I Saw the Devil, The Good, the Bad, the Weird) has good fun with such American iconography as the Arizona desert, oversize guns, and Arnold Schwarzenegger; but the film still feels like a South Korean action comedy in its funky compositions and fluid camerawork, which privilege spatial coherence over moment-to-moment sensation. The story suggests a Looney Tunes reworking of Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, with Schwarzenegger playing a small-town sheriff forced to stop a violent drug cartel on its way to the Mexican border. This is enjoyable, if also rather thin; for all his craftsmanship and comic energy, Kim never endows the familiar material with any thematic urgency or personal investment. The lively supporting cast includes Forest Whitaker, Johnny Knoxville, and Luis Guzman. This opens commercially tomorrow.
Friday, January 11, 2013
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.
Friday, January 4, 2013
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.
Friday, December 28, 2012
Opening Film The best, the worst, and the rest of this week's movies
Posted by J.R. Jones on 12.28.12 at 07:34 AM
This week, to augment the Photo Issue, Ben Sachs, Drew Hunt, and I are calling our favorite films of the year. If you're a sucker for this sort of year-end blather, check out the Bleader for our 2012 genre picks (animation, human-interest doc, comedy, political doc, sci-fi/fantasy movie, action/suspense movie, horror movie), plus the year's best revival and the worst of 2012.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Art House Opening Film This way, myth: Leos Carax's Holy Motors
Posted by Ben Sachs on 11.08.12 at 07:35 AM
Like everything else by the singular writer-director Leos Carax, Holy Motors (which opens Friday at the Music Box) is so intensely personal that uninitiated viewers might wish they were provided footnotes before going in. To cite just one of the film's cryptic gestures, between the final shot and the end credits, Carax briefly fills the screen with a photograph identified by only a few words in Cyrillic. The photograph is of Yekaterina Golubeva, the Russian actress who played a leading role in Carax's previous feature, Pola X (1999), and appeared in movies by Claire Denis and Bruno Dumont. Golubeva and Carax had lived together for several years and were raising a child when she died under mysterious circumstances last year. While Holy Motors is generally playful in its storytelling—the dreamlike plot concerns a shapeshifting figure named Monsieur Oscar (Carax's real middle name, incidentally) who assumes about a dozen different identities over the course of a day—its tone becomes increasingly morbid as it goes along. If you're unfamiliar with the director's biography, this unusual progression just might seem perverse.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Opening Food Chain Film Food & Drink This week in Bollywood screenings: Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana
Posted by Ben Sachs on 11.02.12 at 03:52 PM
Having just closed Barfi! after an unexpected monthlong run, today River East opens another comedy from UTV Motion Pictures, the Indian multimedia conglomerate recently purchased by the Walt Disney Company. It's called Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana, and with an attention-grabbing title like that, how could they lose? (I have no idea what "chicken Khurana" is, but it sounds delicious.) The unsubtitled trailer promises more of the qualities that made Barfi! so much fun: vibrant colors, cartoonish characters, an ingratiating pop soundtrack, and gorgeous regional locations (this time, in the Punjabi villages of northern India).
The press notes describe the movie as follows:
Friday, October 12, 2012
Opening Film Now playing: a new horror film starring Ethan Hawke
Posted by Ben Sachs on 10.12.12 at 11:24 AM
This formulaic horror movie serves mainly to illustrate what a resourceful actor Ethan Hawke has become; as a washed-up true-crime author desperate for a hit, he plays on his boyish energy to suggest a darting intelligence beneath the character's vanity and opportunism. The writer discovers a supernatural entity while investigating a series of unsolved murders, and in a twist that's likely to please celluloid buffs, the creepiest evidence comes from eight-millimeter film reels he must splice together himself. Most of this takes place inside the character's house, and writer-director Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) turns in some resourceful work too, finding new ways to frame the same rooms from one scene to the next and providing comic relief whenever the action threatens to turn monotonously grim.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Opening Film Now playing: Spike Lee's Red Hook Summer
Posted by Drew Hunt on 08.24.12 at 05:38 PM
Spike Lee's films range from undeniable masterworks (Do the Right Thing, Inside Man) to flawed but intriguing efforts (Summer of Sam, Clockers) to outright failures (Miracle at St. Anna, Malcolm X). This drama, about a 13-year-old boy from suburban Atlanta (Jules Brown) who spends a summer in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood with his preacher grandfather (Clarke Peters of The Wire), falls into the middle category: its sights and sounds evoke Lee's best New York stories, and there are some noteworthy performances, particularly from Peters as the charismatic holy man with a dark past. But Lee's typically paradoxical statements on race and religion muddle the narrative, and his old stylistic tricks—saturated color schemes, characters addressing the camera—aren't exactly inspired. Screening times here.
Friday, August 10, 2012
Opening We're Old Film The challenges of Hope Springs
Posted by Ben Sachs on 08.10.12 at 01:06 PM
I can't bring myself to recommend the new release Hope Springs (imagine an ABC sitcom about your parents' sex life), though I'll admit it's something of a master class in screen acting. The film calls upon Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones to bring depth to characters who aren't very sympathetic or even all that interesting, and the veteran performers apply all their resources to the challenge. (And Steve Carrell, in an imploded performance as Streep and Jones's therapist, looks very plausible in a tie.) In a way, Hope Springs is as pure a demonstration of their talents as you're likely to see, since there's hardly any story or directorial style to mitigate them.
