Film: Bleader, Chicago Reader

Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby is not the first movie to insult F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ben Sachs — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:24:16 -0500

If nothing else, the recent release of Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby adaptation provides a good excuse to revisit the sole film on which F. Scott Fitzgerald received screenwriting credit, the 1938 melodrama Three Comrades. The movies are similar insofar that neither one really respects Fitzgerald's writing—the author was reportedly unhappy with Comrades because relatively little of his work made it into the completed film.…

Zardoz has spoken, and your penis may never be the same

J.R. Jones — Wed, 22 May 2013 06:47:36 -0500

There are good movies, there are bad movies, and then there's Zardoz (1974), which the Northwest Chicago Film Society screens tonight at the Portage. Fresh from the triumph of Deliverance (1972), John Boorman persuaded 20th Century Fox to bankroll his futuristic fantasy, set in the year 2293, in which Sean Connery struts around in a ponytail and porn mustache, wearing a red bandolero across his bare chest, red hot pants, and black-leather boots up to his thighs.…

Black Cinema House has The Blues—and more—this Friday

Ben Sachs — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:10:39 -0500

On Friday night around 8:15 PM the south side arts organization Black Cinema House will host the first program in a summer-long series called "Movies Under Stars." Copresented by Chicago Film Archives, the outdoor series centers on documentary shorts about jazz and blues musicians, with other rare nonfiction works rounding out the lineup. This week's program consists of: The Blues, a 1973 doc by music historian Samuel Charters depicting southern bluesmen performing at home; Give My Poor Heart Ease (produced by the Center for Southern Folklore in 1975), which focuses on blues from the Mississippi Delta; and American Shoeshine, a 1976 doc in the direct-cinema mode about shoeshiners.…

Remembering Chicago's great school boycott of 1963

Ben Joravsky — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:27:00 -0500

The city's all-powerful mayor was ignoring their pleas, so the public students of Chicago felt they had no choice but to walk out of school and march in protest.

That could be a headline ripped from today's pages, as students join parents and teachers to protest Mayor Emanuel's decision to close 54 public schools.…

The mixed blessing of watching movies online

Ben Sachs — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:36:26 -0500

It's increasingly common for distributors to make movies previewable on password-protected webpages, and for exhibitors to send critics passwords rather than discs, as they've done in the past. Truth be told, this is how I watched several movies I reviewed in the last month.…

Weekly Top Five: Joseph Lewis and the B movie swamp

Drew Hunt — Sun, 19 May 2013 14:00:00 -0500

Tomorrow night, the University of Chicago's Doc Films will screen the Joseph H. Lewis noir Gun Crazy, one of the major works of classic B cinema and one of the most radical and thoroughly entertaining movies in American film history, period. Prior to a renewed interest in expressionistic style during the 1970s, Lewis was considered a simple B movie director in the United States.…

An interview with Dan Sallitt, director of The Unspeakable Act

Ben Sachs — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:05:00 -0500

The Unspeakable Act, which screens this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center (and with writer-director Dan Sallitt in attendance tonight and tomorrow afternoon), is an opaque independent drama about family ties. The title refers to incest, although the movie isn't concerned with shock value or sex.…

Incest, adultery, and the rest of this week's screenings

J.R. Jones — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:36:26 -0500

In this week's long review Drew Hunt considers The Unspeakable Act, a new indie drama by Dan Sallitt in which a high school senior ponders her intimate feelings for her college-age brother. I review Stories We Tell, a documentary by Sarah Polley (Away From Her, Take This Waltz) about her discovery that her biological father was a Montreal film producer with whom her mother had a brief affair.…

The Iceman: A true-crime story in shorthand

Ben Sachs — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:47:00 -0500

When did people start saying "porn" as shorthand for pornography? It sounds like a product of the home video era, when pornographic movies became easier to come by: a flat, workaday term for an increasingly familiar commodity.…

Now online: Adam Curtis's Margaret Thatcher memorial

Ben Sachs — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:31:11 -0500

A few weeks ago British filmmaker Adam Curtis responded to the death of Margaret Thatcher by uploading The Attic, his 1995 TV movie about her, to his BBC-sponsored blog. "I'm putting it up as a bit of a corrective to the terrifying wonk-fest that took over after Mrs. Thatcher died," Curtis wrote in a new postscript.…

Does national culture determine moviegoing habits?

Ben Sachs — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:02:00 -0500

"The Japanese film audience still behaves much as it does at the theater," wrote Donald Richie in his A Hundred Years of Japanese Film. "Members . . .…

This week in Indian cinema: Wadala, Goa, and Gatsby,

Ben Sachs — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:32:20 -0500

This week the River East 21 is showing two new Bollywood releases: Go Goa Gone, a horror-comedy about zombies attacking a rave party, and Shootout at Wadala, an action film inspired by the real-life standoff between Mumbai police and gangster Manya Surve in 1982. I suspect either film will make for a decent double feature with Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (also playing at River East), which feels closer in spirit to a Bollywood spectacle than to F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel.…

Joyce, Fitzgerald, and the rest of this week's screenings

J.R. Jones — Fri, 10 May 2013 07:30:31 -0500

In this week's long review Tal Rosenberg makes a case for Olivier Assayas's latest feature, Something in the Air, as a mature revision of his first international success, Cold Water, akin to James Joyce's revision of his aborted first novel, "Stephen Hero," into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. If that's not literate enough for you, we've also got a short review of The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann's big-screen adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic.…

See Yasujiro Ozu's final silent film this Saturday

Ben Sachs — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:27:21 -0500

This Saturday at noon, the Music Box will screen Yasujiro Ozu's An Inn in Tokyo (1935) in its monthly silent-cinema series. It's a special movie in a number of ways: not only was it the last silent film made by Ozu—one of the greatest of Japanese filmmakers—it was one of the last Japanese silent films, period.…

Does Aqui y Allà (Here and There) take you anywhere?

Ben Sachs — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:20:00 -0500

Since I reviewed it last fall, I've often found myself thinking about a shot in the Turkish film Honey. From a stationary position at the top of a hill, the camera looks down at a middle-aged woman picking tea leaves.…

Haile Gerima answers for Bush Mama at Logan Center for the Arts

J.R. Jones — Tue, 07 May 2013 14:53:56 -0500

The credits of Bush Mama (1976) list Haile Gerima not as director but as "answerable," a welcome gesture of responsibility from a filmmaker and especially admirable given the film's incendiary nature. Shot in black and white as Gerima's thesis film for UCLA, it follows the slow but steady political radicalization of a young woman in Watts in the bitter ruins of the black power movement.…

Doc Films begins a two-part program of recent Indian documentaries

Ben Sachs — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:33:40 -0500

Today at 5:30 PM Doc Films will host a free screening of the 2007 Indian documentary Jashn-e-Azadi (How We Celebrate Freedom), an epic portrait of life in Kashmir. Director Sanjay Kak (who's been making documentaries in India since the late 1980s) shot the movie over a three-year period, documenting numerous civilians trying to lead ordinary lives in spite of ongoing sectarian violence.…

In the case of celluloid, it's better to fade away than to burn out

Ben Sachs — Mon, 06 May 2013 16:28:56 -0500

"The print's about 20 percent faded," estimated Chicago Cinema Society's Neil Calderone when I saw him in the Patio Theater lobby before last night's screening of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I can't verify or challenge that figure, but the archival print (struck during the film's initial 1976 run, Calderone proudly informed me) was indeed flawed.…

Weekly Top Five: Dream on—the American dream on film

Drew Hunt — Sun, 05 May 2013 09:00:00 -0500

For this week's long review, Ben Sachs wrote about the new Michael Bay film, Pain & Gain, noting the way it "argues that the American dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has been perverted to justify literally anything that will help you accrue privilege and material wealth and lord them over everyone else." I've yet to see the film myself, but Bay's cynical view of the American dream strikes me as curious.…

Pain & Gain, the latest addition to the "fire with fire" genre

Ben Sachs — Fri, 03 May 2013 16:17:00 -0500

In my long review of Pain & Gain that appears in this week's issue, I invoke Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls as an example of a film whose predominant attitude towards its own setting is one of pointed disgust. I could have also cited Alex Cox's Repo Man, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, Mike Judge's Idiocracy, or Verhoeven's Spetters and Starship Troopers.…

Alex Espinoza talks about Latino actors in old Hollywood and The Five Acts of Diego León

Aimee Levitt — Fri, 03 May 2013 12:36:00 -0500

By some weird coincidence, the same week I wrote about the Goodman's new production of Lynn Nottage's By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, which is about the compromises an African-American actress has to make to have a career in 1930s Hollywood, a new book about the movies landed on my desk, this one about the compromises a Latino actor has to make to have a career in 1930s Hollywood. (It was also the second book I read this week that mentioned the P'urhépecha, a native Mexican tribe that lives in the state of Michoacán, but I digress.)

Which was a sign from somewhere that I had to read The Five Acts of Diego León, the second novel by Alex Espinoza.…

Feeling the burn, and the rest of this week's screenings

J.R. Jones — Fri, 03 May 2013 07:35:50 -0500

This week Ben Sachs benches 1,040 words with his review of Pain & Gain, Michael Bay's satire about three bodybuilders (Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie) who stumble into a life of crime. I've also got a short review (less than 500 words, but I'm doing a ton of reps) of Persistence of Vision, a documentary about an animator's three-decade quest to complete his masterpiece, and a recommended review of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, an adaptation of the international best seller that marks a return to form for Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala, The Namesake).…

This weekend's must-see revival: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie on 35-millimeter

Ben Sachs — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:17:40 -0500

There are several impressive repertory screenings in Chicago this weekend—Doc Films has The Godfather Part II and Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, and the Music Box is showing Orson Welles's Touch of Evil and Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet—but if I had to single out a must-see, it would be John Cassavetes's The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), which the Chicago Cinema Society will screen at the Patio Theater on Friday and Sunday from a 35-millimeter print. Like Touch of Evil, Chinese Bookie is a highly personal take on the crime film; in his Reader capsule, Jonathan Rosenbaum described the film's antihero, a strip-club owner forced to commit the titular crime, as the director's alter ego.…

Austin Pendleton goes time-tripping back to Skidoo

J.R. Jones — Thu, 02 May 2013 12:48:00 -0500

Every effort should be made to keep young people away from drugs, but movies like Skidoo remind you that old people should be kept away from them too. One of the many cultural stones turned over by AMC's Mad Men was the moment when establishment types starting fooling around with LSD; among them was Otto Preminger—the imperious director of Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959)—who dropped acid under the supervision of no less than Dr. Timothy Leary.…

In Another Country: Hong Sang-soo's visions and revisions

Ben Sachs — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:57:00 -0500

Hong Sang-soo's 2012 feature In Another Country, which never received a single theatrical screening in Chicago but is now available on DVD, opens with a fine Buñuelian joke. A young woman commiserates with her mother about their family going bankrupt and having to leave Seoul in disgrace as a result of her uncle's shady dealings.…