Film
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Film, Music, Free Shit Oddsac
Posted by Ed M. Koziarski on Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 1:19 PM
- "Oddsac"
Danny Perez's 57-minute audiovisual freakout Oddsac, which premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, looks to be about as weird as one might hope from a collaboration with Animal Collective, with an original score by the band that reportedly will only be released with the film.
Perez and members of Animal Collective appear at two sold-out shows Wednesday 3/17 at the Music Box Theatre. Oddsac tweeted this morning that tickets were available for volunteers.
Also from Twitter, via Stereogum: "ODDSAC, the Animal Collective film, makes Matthew Barney look like Matthew McConaughey. Trippy, dense, intense, atonal, dark, fractured” -@jamesrocchi
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Film, Music 2001, Wizard of Oz, and Top Gun—Fast
Posted by Ed M. Koziarski on Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 11:59 AM
- Fair Use Trio
New York laptop jockeys The Fair Use Trio "use the picture and soundtrack of culturally significant films, drastically compressed in time, as the sole materials for an improvised set which interrogates our cinematic memories through frenetic audiovisual processing and re-narration of the cinematic object," according to Brooklyn's ISSUE Project Room.
The Fair Use Trio detourn 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard of Oz, and Top Gun on Tuesday 3/16 at The Nightingale.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Film, Free Shit Our Trip to Africa
Posted by Ed M. Koziarski on Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 9:46 AM
- "Unsere Afrikareise"
Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka spent five years scrambling and reassociating images and sounds from a 1961 African hunting trip into the 12-minute Unsere Afrikareise, screening Monday 3/15 in a free program of landscape films at the School of the Art Institute.
"There is often a temptation to read direct thematic statements in many of the film's articulations. Editing connections are continually made on the white hunters' gazes, hand gestures, and gun-pointing, linking those actions to suggest the Europeans' aggression toward their surroundings," Fred Camper writes in Film Reference.
"Kubelka's cuts often suggest that a European has just 'shot' an African, or the forest itself. The Africans, by contrast, appear as part of nature, rather than separate from it. It would be a serious mistake, however, to limit one's perception of the film to such themes...The viewer is ultimately led out of time, to contemplate these connections in memory, and to regard the film as if it were a monument erected as a record of civilization, not as a statement on it but as a kind of totem for it."
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Chicagoland, Food Chain, Film, Music, Food & Drink, Performing Arts Dinner & a Show: Saturday 3/13
Posted by Whet Moser on Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 1:04 PM
Show: Joe Frank "His stories range from penetrating personal discussions of love and mortality to outsize tales of outrageous folly, like the one about a businessman attempting to set up a luxury ski resort in the middle of the Sahara desert," writes Alex Yablon. "But regardless of subject matter, they generate the sort of deeply uneasy, darkly hilarious mood associated with a David Lynch movie."
8pm, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St., 312-335-1650, $29
Dinner: Salpicon Though she didn’t actually cook for Rick Bayless—Priscila Satkoff was his assistant—the Mexico City native’s early training at the side of her mother and grandmother helped propel her tiny Old Town spot to an upscale destination rivaling her old boss’s.
1252 N. Wells St., 312-988-7811
Friday, March 12, 2010
Media, Film Green Zone — Now We Know
Posted by Michael Miner on Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 11:25 AM
A revisionist notion that has never gotten any serious traction, no matter how fervently the children of the 1930s isolationists keep putting it on the table, is the one arguing that America entered World War II under false pretenses. The argument isn't that the attack on Pearl Harbor didn’t take place — a whopper of that magnitude would have to await the historic breakthroughs in human credulity that have given us a staged moon landing and 9/11 as an American plot. It's that — or so they keep insisting — FDR knew about the attack in advance and kept his mouth shut because he wanted us in the war.
Film, Free Shit, Environment School of Nature: The Children of Satoyama
Posted by Ed M. Koziarski on Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 10:38 AM
- School of Nature: The Children of Satoyama
It's an opportune time to explore Japan's relationship to nature, what with The Cove's Oscar win and yesterday's arrest in Tokyo of New Zealand anti-whaling activist Peter Bethune.
Surely this isn't the kind of profile the Japan Information Center is going for with its Japan and Nature Film Series, concluding Friday 3/12 at Columbia College with a free screening of Masaki Haramura's documentary School of Nature: The Children of Satoyama.
“Children will not grow unless they are put in a risky environment. They will not grow healthily unless they get injured, covered in mud and play rough and physical games," Eijyu Miyazaki says in the film. Haramura examines Miyazaki's iconoclastic pedagogy and its impact at the Kisarazu Community Nursery School in Satoyama, Chiba.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Film This Week's Movie Action
Posted by J.R. Jones on Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 8:04 PM
- Red Riding
This week the Music Box presents the British crime trilogy Red Riding, with a $21 pass good for all three movies. Our new issue includes a long review of the trilogy and individual write-ups of Red Riding: 1974, Red Riding: 1980, and Red Riding: 1983.
Architecture, Film Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture
Posted by Ed M. Koziarski on Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 1:53 PM
- Shooting "Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture"
Researching south-side housing discrimination for a graduate history degree at Loyola University, former Dallas graphic designer Mark Richard Smith was taken by Richard Nickel's photographs of Louis Sullivan's architecture.
Smith embarked on his first documentary, Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture, investing a quarter million dollars of his personal savings and suffering a heart attack that he attributes to the stress of the production.
Smith writes: "I saw Sullivan’s struggle to promote an American style of architecture as a profound reaction to the rapidly shifting values of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century: a formerly isolated nation of farmers, craftsmen and maritime traders transforming itself into an international industrial powerhouse.
"Ironically, even as Louis Sullivan’s belief in the important links between nature, individual worth and creativity seemed lost in the cacophonous, anonymous, filthy and exploitive world of the industrial city, he produced works of genius totally in touch with the needs of urban life."
Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture has a preview screening Sunday 3/14 at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
Chicagoland, Food Chain, Lit & Lectures, Film, Music, Food & Drink, Performing Arts Dinner & a Show: Thursday 3/11
Posted by Whet Moser on Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 1:30 PM
- carl sweets
- Shapers
Show: Shapers "Shapers stepped onto the Chicago scene fully loaded. Their debut as a live band was just this past fall, and now they're self-releasing their first album, Little, Big*," writes Jessica Hopper, "a sweet heap of artful krautrock (Neu! and Cluster are clear influences) with occasional fitful vocals, and its nine songs cover an interstellar range."
9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433 or 866-468-3401, $5.
Dinner: The Southern's slightly refined Dixie-inspired fare in a casual bar setting is a good platform for chef Cary Taylor's talents. One of three new Chicago restaurants reviewed this week.
1840 W. North, 773-342-1840
* Ed. note: Named after the John Crowley novel? Have heard great things about that book.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Film, Visual Art The Art of the Steal
Posted by Ed M. Koziarski on Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 1:05 PM
- Albert C. Barnes
Albert C. Barnes used the fortune he amassed from his invention of the antiseptic Argyrol to amass one of the world's preeminent collections of post-Impressionist and Modernist art. Valued at $6 billion, the collection includes 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes (more than in the entire city of Paris), and 59 Matisses.
Barnes stipulated in his will that the collection could be viewed only by private appointment at an out-of-the-way Philadelphia museum. So it was for 50 years, until in 2002 the Barnes Foundation board resolved to move the collection to a new public location in Center City, near the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The decision incited a lawsuit from advocates of the Barnes Museum's current location and a fiery debate about the public value of art and when it's legitimate to defy a dead philanthropist's intentions.
Don Argott covers the controversy like an art heist in his documentary The Art of the Steal, screening Wednesday 3/10 at Northwestern's Block Museum.
