New on Our Blog: Jennifer Reeder Interview
In advance of the opening of her new film KNIVES AND SKIN (next Friday, December 13, at the Music Box Theatre) we have an interview with local filmmaker Jennifer Reeder by Cine-File contributor Michael Glover Smith.
CRUCIAL VIEWING
Herbert Brenon’s PETER PAN (Silent American Revival)
The Chicago Film Society and the Music Box Theatre (at the Music Box) – Monday, 7pm
For those who love hissing at Mr. Potter while swatting away tears during IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, dancing along to the “Time Warp” at a rambunctious screening of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, or inexplicably throwing spoons at the screen during THE ROOM (all experiences to be had this week at the Music Box Theatre, incidentally enough), Herbert Brenon’s PETER PAN will delight when, as in J.M. Barrie’s famous stage play, Peter looks directly at the audience and asks us to clap so that Tinker Bell may live. It’s interactive and, yes, cheesy, but also delightful in a way that sums up the entire viewing experience. By that point, even the most austere cinephiles will be clapping furiously, perhaps in tacit agreement that Tink represents not just the magic of the story, but the magic of the screen. Adapted by Willis Goldbeck, the film closely adheres to the play (Barrie wrote his own version for the screen, but Brenon declined to use it), even utilizing some of the stage dialogue in the intertitles. Still, despite its popularity as a stage show, the film version—its first adaptation to the screen—feels wholly separate from theater, even as we’re asked to help resuscitate Tink. The search for the titular troublemaker, always played by a young woman on the stage, is another of the movies’ fabled searches: in lieu of such cherub-faced megastars as Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, and Lillian Gish, Barrie himself chose the 17-year-old Betty Bronson, who shines in the role. Following the established trajectory, the film starts at the Darling residence, where, most jarringly, Nana the nurse-dog is played by a man in a dog costume, acclaimed “animal impersonator” George Ali. Soon enough Peter is wrestling with his shadow, and he, Wendy, and her brothers are off to Neverland, where they find themselves at odds with the imperious Captain Hook (Ernest Torrence)—ever-haunted by the dastardly crocodile, also played by Ali and rendered just as uncannily—whose crew kidnaps Wendy, her brothers, and the Lost Boys. (Before this point, a young Anna May Wong appears as Tiger Lily.) Peter saves the day, and Wendy, who’s become the boys’ adoptive mother, and her brothers return home with the crew in tow, with Mrs. Darling promising Peter that Wendy can visit once a year to help with spring cleaning, its gender politics admittedly the least charming thing about it. The story, prefaced with a title card featuring a missive “On the Acting of a Fairy Play,” is enchanting as always, but it’s the art direction, inspired set design and special effects that elevate it cinematically. Rarely is the stuff of so-called play-acting this lushly realized, wondrous yet tactile. Like Neverland, it’s a dream within reach. Preceded by Walter Lantz’s 1925 silent cartoon PETER PAN HANDLED (7 min, 16mm). (1924, 102 min, 35mm) KS
---
Live accompaniment by Dennis Scott.
Agnès Varda’s VARDA BY AGNÈS (New French Documentary)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
I was 25 when I met Agnès Varda in 2015. In town for a brief residency at the University of Chicago, she came to the Music Box for a screening of CLEO FROM 5 TO 7. I was told we’d need to create a privatized area for her to relax before the screening. The moment she arrived with two nervous students in tow as handlers, I quickly learned to expect the unexpected. After introducing herself, she stated there was no need for a green room because she wanted to be among the people and meet the young folks of Chicago. The final film by the legendary French New Wave director, VARDA BY AGNÈS, is a glorious celebration of the rebellious spirit and exuberant personality I met then. The documentary, focused on her contributions to cinema and the art world as a whole, is part a personal highlight reel of her illustrious body of work and part a self-reflection on life. VARDA finds Varda alternating between musings on her career and speaking with intimacy directly into the camera, as if the viewer were sitting face-to-face with her in reverent conversation, like an old friend. The film overflows with Varda’s sense of whimsy and zest for life and showcases her incredible aptitude as a filmmaker. With an oeuvre that stretches nearly seven decades, there is perhaps no one better to encapsulate her vast achievements than the women herself. (2019, 115 min, DCP Digital) KC
Theo Angelopoulos’ LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST (Greek Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 1:30pm
Pre-teenager Voula and her younger brother Alexandros (who’s around eight) impulsively leave their home in Greece and hit the road for Germany, where they believe they’ll find their estranged father. Neither child remembers the man, nor does either know precisely where he lives; complicating matters further, the two children haven’t brought any money for their journey, meaning they must advance by hitchhiking or sneaking onto trains. LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST follows these young characters as they move north, and despite the perilousness of their adventure and the longing for familial reconciliation that motivates it, the film isn’t suspenseful or sentimental. Rather, it’s a certain bittersweet poetry that Theo Angelopoulos is after—he’s less concerned with character and story than with location and mood. Often filming the action in detached long takes, he asks viewers to consider Voula and Alexandros in terms of the shifting terrain and, implicitly, modern Greek history. One man who helps the children at a few points in the story is a traveling actor who’s about to give up theater to begin his compulsory military service (possibly an allusion to Greece’s then-recent military dictatorship), while other helpers seem rooted to the towns in which they live, either because their jobs bind them to the place or because of the tableau-like manner in which Angelopoulos presents them. LANDSCAPE isn’t an easy film to warm to; casual viewers may find the filmmaking too withholding while cinephiles may find it overly redolent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s existentialist meditations of the 60s and Wim Wenders’ road movies of the 70s. Yet the emotional undercurrent, which is never really that far from the surface, might nonetheless catch you unawares, and there are enough striking images to hold your attention. The most famous sequence involves a giant stone hand being lifted out of the sea by a helicopter and flown over a coastal city, yet the extended tracking shot of the traveling theater troupe waylaid on a beach is spellbinding in its own right. (1988, 127 min, 35mm) BS
Nadav Lapid’s SYNONYMS (New Israeli/French)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
Before a word has even been spoken, the Israeli-émigré protagonist of SYNONYMS is running around a Parisian apartment building buck naked, his clothes and towels having been pilfered while he was taking a nighttime shower. He darts about in a panic, slipping on the hardwood floor, banging desperately on the doors of his neighbors to no avail. Freezing and alone, he finally falls asleep in his bathtub. Who hasn’t felt exactly (or, well, metaphorically) like this, vulnerable and bewildered in an unfamiliar place? It’s a condition Nadav Lapid captures with both agitation and melancholy in his digressive, darkly comical film, in which his semi-autobiographical surrogate Yoav (Tom Mercier, in a debut performance of impressively knockabout physicality) shambles through a cycle of disorienting, passive-aggressive episodes in the country he’s chosen, without much of a good reason, to call home. This isn’t the last or even the most painful time he’ll be stripped bare, but it’s the moment that most stingingly encapsulates his character: young, impetuous, ultimately defenseless, and in perpetual flight. SYNONYMS thus gestures at a familiar trajectory of cultural dislocation and ennui, but Lapid often confounds our expectations by straying from narrative beats that would simply render Yoav as an alienated immigrant. For one, he’s got good pals. Rescued by neighbors Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), he’s fixed up with a shabby studio apartment and a striking mustard-yellow overcoat. While he brushes up on his French vocabulary, he indulgently plays raconteur to the pair, with writer Emile particularly inspired by his colorful stories. Still, we wonder: what is Yoav doing here? Having mastered a sequence of French synonyms, he tells Emile that Israel is “detestable” and “fetid,” and that he’s not going back. Without having to give a clear reason for his self-imposed exile, Lapid locates in this defiantly restless millennial a crisis of national identity and belonging in a globalized world, one that is, moreover, underpinned by a legacy of anti-Semitism and Jewish diaspora. The Paris of SYNONYMS doesn’t provide much relief; it may be a multicultural melting pot, but it’s grubby and nearly nondescript through Lapid’s frequently vérité-style DV street footage, which consistently effaces signifiers of the city’s historic and touristic appeal. And as Yoav meanders through it, his stubbornness and self-abnegation becoming weapons turned more against himself than the homeland he rejects, his assimilation to France increasingly surfaces the hard, queasy truths of nationalism that exists in Western Europe as much as in Israel or the United States. Maybe places are more alike than they aren’t, and maybe being stranded in an unfurnished apartment without your clothes is actually the best way to find that out. (2019, 123 min, DCP Digital) JL
Barry O’Neil’s WHEN THE EARTH TREMBLED, OR THE STRENGTH OF LOVE (Silent American Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Friday, 7pm (Free Admission)
The description for this program is aptly poetic, and, I’d say, speaks to the reasons why cinephiles especially love these kinds of screenings: “A selection of early films that survive purely by chance or as fragments.” That much of silent cinema is lost and that only bits of it endure—purely by chance or as fragments—embodies, albeit distressingly, the fragility of cinema, and thus, for many, its allure, in a way that things like DCPs and streaming just cannot. It’s appropriate, then, that, at the heart of two of the films in the program, is an earthquake—the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, to be exact. What better to represent something occurring by chance or existing in fragments than this particular natural disaster? Available for preview were SAN FRANCISCO AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE (1906, 9 min, 35mm restored archival print) and the program’s titular film, Barry O’Neil’s WHEN THE EARTH TREMBLED, OR THE STRENGTH OF LOVE (1913, 48 min, 35mm restored archival print), both restored by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The former is an eerie amalgamation of three short films by the San Francisco-based Miles Brothers film company, whose studio was destroyed in the earthquake, which happened on April 18, 1906. According to an opening title card, it’s comprised of portions of three films advertised for sale as #351 - Fifth St. to Market, down to Ferry; #346 - Refugees Leaving City with their goods at Ferry Bldg; Blasting at City Hall; and #344 - Dynamiting Prager’s Dept. Store, at Jones and Market Sts, all shot after the earthquake. The first portion, Fifth St. to Market, down to Ferry, is both reminiscent of and a marked contrast to the Miles Brothers’ famous short film A TRIP DOWN MARKET STREET, determined to have been shot just days before the earthquake, surviving only because the brothers had fortuitously sent it along to New York. What seems a marvel for its documentation of the disaster is also an extraordinary study of composition and depth. The last part, Dynamiting Prager’s Dept. Store, at Jones and Market Sts, is tinted red just as in the original nitrate print; the effect is chilling. WHEN THE EARTH TREMBLED, OR THE STRENGTH OF LOVE takes a more sentimental approach, its narrative using the earthquake as a device to elucidate its protagonists’ misfortune before a predictably satisfying happy ending. Produced by the Lubin Manufacturing Company, headed by cinema pioneer Siegmund Lubin and an early rival of Edison’s before eventually joining forces with his and several other production companies to form the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPCC), it was their first three-reel film after having made thousands of one- and two-reel films and was offered as part of what was known within the MPCC as the Exclusive Service, created to meet the demand for longer titles. Directed by one of Lubin’s most prodigious directors, Barry O’Neil, it also features two of the company’s top stars, Harry Myers and Ethel Clayton, as a husband and wife, Paul Girard and Dora Sims, torn apart by first a shipwreck and later the earthquake. Myers is best known for starring as the eccentric, boozy millionaire in Charlie Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS, and Clayton started out in movies at the Essanay Film Company here in Chicago. At the beginning of the film, Paul and Dora, the children of estranged business partners, meet and fall in love in Paris. Rather than join his father at his firm, Paul opts to help Dora’s father with opening a branch in Samoa. After being sent back to aid in warding off his father’s intervention, he’s presumed killed in a shipwreck; soon thereafter, the earthquake strikes, Dora’s father dies, and she and the children move away. After Paul, having survived the wreck, makes it back to the States, and owing to Paul’s father, regretful over his son’s supposed death but still bitter toward Dora and her father, all are reunited. The film itself is presented as fragments, with each development presented in several-minute increments, and it could be said to exist purely by chance due to its surviving despite a vault fire that destroyed all the company’s negatives produced since its founding in 1896. Most impressive are the earthquake scenes, which feature breakaway sets that took five weeks to build and two minutes to destroy. (It also includes some of Lubin’s own footage from the aftermath.) Preceding WHEN THE EARTH TREMBLED, in addition to SAN FRANCISCO AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE, are [Vitagraph Paper Print Fragments No. 5] (Various/Unidentified Directors, 1908, 10 min, 35mm archival print) and Maurice Costello and Robert Gaillard’s THE SALE OF A HEART (1913, 15 min, 35mm restored archival print), the former literal fragments and the latter, like most silent films, surviving purely by chance, early cinema an earthquake and these films its aftershocks, reverberating through time. KS
---
Live accompaniment by David Drazin.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Spencer Williams’ THE BLOOD OF JESUS (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm
Among the creators of the race films that brought stories by and about African Americans to segregated Black audiences from the 1920s through the 1940s, Spencer Williams holds a prominent place. He acted in 33 films, including the 13 films he directed, and made the most of his low budgets and largely unskilled actors, showing impressive growth in technique, storytelling, and versatility as he worked. THE BLOOD OF JESUS was the first feature film he directed. Working from his own script, he plunged deep into the religious mythos and traditions of African-American Christianity while bringing a twist to his story of temptation and redemption. He skillfully plays Razz Jackson, the unredeemed husband of Martha Ann (Cathryn Caviness), who we see being newly reborn in a baptism in the river. He accidentally shoots her, setting up her journey to the crossroads where she must choose the path to Zion or Hell, with a clownish devil in long johns (James B. Jones) and an angel (Rogenia Goldthwaite) appearing periodically to guide Martha Ann toward their respective domains. While the story focuses on Martha Ann, whose newly saved soul is still vulnerable to corruption, it is Razz’s conversion that underlies the drama. Aside from Williams’ performance, the acting is pretty weak, and the production values are strictly bargain basement. The action appears to have been filmed without sound, with a badly synched soundtrack added later. But this film has an ethnographic authenticity, sincerity, and an almost nonstop gospel track that make it enchanting. I particularly liked the scenes in a juke joint where Williams’ young performers show off their jitterbugging skills. Martha Ann’s choice literally relies on the blood of Jesus in a scene of real power, and the film as a whole must have made a strong impression on its original African-American audience. (1941, 57 min, DCP Digital) MF
---
Lecture by critic and artist Fred Camper.
Jack Arnold’s THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 2pm, Saturday, 3pm, and Wednesday, 6pm
The line between science fiction and horror is often breached because humanity’s fear of the unknown has proven fertile soil for the fevered imaginations of sci-fi writers and filmmakers. The 1950s, of course, produced a slew of Atomic Age nightmares, as the science fact of massively destructive weapons merged with the paranoias of the time. This period in human and movie history also was awash in psychoanalysis, with Freudian theories all the rage in films of all types. The 1957 sci-fi/horror classic THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN is firmly rooted in these socioscientific concerns. The plot is propelled by environmental horrors. A radioactive cloud floats toward the boat where the title character, Scott Carey (Grant Williams), and his wife, Louise (Randy Stuart), are relaxing and coats him with a stardust sheen. Scott doesn’t start shrinking, however, until he is exposed to insecticide after they return home. While there is plenty of frightening action ahead, it is in the aftermath of these initial events that the film takes on more psychological and philosophical shading, and makes a pointed critique of a society slipping a straitjacket of conformity and wholesomeness over its citizens following the chaos and lingering malaise of World War II. Scott asserts his privilege as a white man in the very first scene by ordering his wife to get him a beer: “To the galley, wench. Fetch me a flagon of beer,” he jests. Unwittingly, he did the manly thing by saving her from getting dusted, but because his rescue was unintentional and unconscious, we know we are in Freud’s realm of the uncanny. Freud said, “The uncanny is anything we experience in adulthood that reminds us of earlier psychic stages, of aspects of our unconscious life, or of the primitive experience of the human species.” In Scott’s case, his body becomes childsize, reduced to dependence on and an infantile relationship with his wife. When he shrinks to the size of a doll, he takes up residence in a dollhouse, a feminizing situation, with his wife’s face looming over him like the overbearing mother’s in Woody Allen’s segment of NEW YORK STORIES (1989). When he becomes even smaller, he must rely on primitive instincts and strategies to survive in a once-familiar, but now alien and threatening environment. Based on Richard Matheson’s book The Shrinking Man, THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN offers the usual thrills and sexual tension that can be found in many of Arnold’s works. His brilliant use of oversize furniture and props, as well as optical printing to put Scott in the same frame as the enormous beings who surround and threaten him, create a convincing world through which we can empathize with Scott’s struggle. I was particularly taken with the gentle cat for which the Careys show obvious affection; its transformation into a dangerous beast chasing its own master seems the perfect metaphor for the destructive force of nature human beings unleashed upon themselves. With global warming filling our skies with the moisture of melting glaciers that cause mammoth hurricanes and biblical floods, the horror and timeliness of THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN cannot be overstated. Scott’s ultimate end puts the human condition into perspective—we are all doomed to join the cosmic dust from which the universe sprang. (1957, 81 min, DCP Digital) MF
Aleksandr Sokurov's RUSSIAN ARK (Russian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Sunday, 7pm
Aleksandr Sokurov's magnum opus—an unbroken hour-and-a-half Steadicam shot that weaves through the rooms of St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum, adopting the perspective of a time traveler (Sokurov, uncredited) who has become lost in Russian history. Part essay film, part historical pageant, the film alternates past glories with periods of hardship—a cyclical sense of culture that's central to Russian nationalism, and Sokurov's work. A radical piece of conservative art. (2002, 96 min, DCP Digital) IV
Lorene Scafaria’s HUSTLERS (New American)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Saturday, 7pm and Sunday, 4pm
It’s J.Lo’s world and we’re all just living in it. Loosely adapted from journalist Jessica Pressler’s 2015 cover story from The Cut, HUSTLERS is a colorful addition to an otherwise dreary genre of films about the 2008 financial crisis— commanded by an infectious ensemble cast and a screenplay overflowing with heart. Jennifer Lopez, Constance Wu, and Keke Palmer are impossible to look away from, playing sex workers who steal from wealthy Wall Street businessmen, forming a fresh band of Robin Hoods in the process. But while the story centers on scams, it’s not a film that carelessly perpetuates harmful stereotypes about sex work, rather it gets at realities of the profession that often go unrepresented in media: the maternal and nurturing relationships formed, the humanity behind the grifts, and fully realized lives in and out of their work. Lorene Scafaria cements herself as an exciting filmmaker to watch, with satisfying blockbuster sensibilities and a mastery of music cues and one-liners. HUSTLERS is a new kind of crowd pleaser, and a welcome one at that. (2019, 110 min, DCP Digital) CC
Louie Schwartzberg's FANTASTIC FUNGI: THE MAGIC BENEATH US (New Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
Did you ever consider that mushrooms, which are after all a form of fungus, could be used to save humanity from pandemic viruses, as well as reduce viruses in bees? That they could fight Alzheimer's, alcoholism, and depression; and climate change and pollution? Indeed, Louie Schwartzberg's fascinating, wildly ambitious, visually spectacular documentary FANTASTIC FUNGI makes more claims for the potential of mushrooms than I could ever summarize in this space: from the medicinal to the spiritual to the gastronomic, from the personal to the world-historical. The film is occasionally profound; though it's not afraid to risk being banal or silly. It also functions as a profile of Paul Stamets, a noted mycologist (that is, a person who studies fungi) and public speaker who farms gourmet mushrooms in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. He's the author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save The World, and the film is driven by his palpable excitement and sense of urgency about getting across ideas which he feels are key to the future of humanity, and the planet. The film demonstrates how New Age (or, if you prefer, non-Western) knowledge about mushrooms is increasingly finding purchase beyond the counterculture, and finding validation by scientists. Moving quickly, it is dense with information and provocative ideas—some perhaps a bit of a stretch, others eminently sensible—featuring a host of interviews with PhDs and authors, including Michael Pollan and Andrew Weil. Schwartzberg, a video artist who's worked for Disney and National Geographic, illustrates and corroborates their assertions with time-lapse and macro cinematography and special effects, all meant to show us "things that are real but invisible to the naked eye." At their best, his trippy, dreamy, beautiful imagery evokes the likes of Douglas Trumbull and Terrence Malick, or Godfrey Reggio's KOYAANISQATSI. (Only once or twice was I reminded of a screensaver.) It's a heady sound and light show, a mystical experience itself, making even chemistry beautiful. We learn that mushrooms are the fruiting body of fungi, and also their organ of sexual reproduction. Indeed, there's a priapic aspect to the film's plethora of time-lapse imagery of elongating, blooming mushrooms. I gazed in wonder at the beauty of their unbelievably diverse shapes, sizes and colors, transforming before my eyes. The fact is that mushrooms are really just the representative tip, though, of a whole invisible fungal network: the bulk of this ancient organism grows underground; it is composed of a mass of branching, elongating threads called mycelium. Mycelium is everywhere below us, an underground world. (In fact, Brie Larson even narrates as the voice of the mycelium fungi.) Among the film's theses is that fungi—that nature itself—is intelligent. The mycelium works like the brain's neural pathways, via electrolytes and electrical pulses. Now, the thing is, as we get older, we become slightly wary. We're on guard for cults, gurus, and visionary charlatans. Naturally critical, we're skeptical of the easy fix. I didn't get the whiff of the indoctrinate from this film, though—just thoughtful, ethical people trying, with hope, to explain a mushroom-centered vision of healing, on the chance that if people understood, things could change. I was profoundly moved by the testimony from psilocybin studies participants at Johns Hopkins. (Psilocybin is the compound found in "magic mushrooms": after a heyday for medical psilocybin research in the '50s and '60s, Nixon made it illegal in 1970.) These are people with terminal cancer who took psilocybin under the supervision of doctors, and who speak of their essentially ineffable experience in terms of a feeling of immense power, of infinite space—of touching the numinous. One woman says she'd never felt so keenly her sense of being worthy of love, of being cared for, of being important to someone—with the implication that that someone is some higher force, or light, or God. It's a vision of nature itself as something like the substance called love. It would seem, then, from these folks' testimony, that psilocybin can help us prepare for the end of life, by reducing the fear of death. We even meet Stamets' octogenarian mother who, receiving a diagnosis of Stage 4 breast cancer, began taking the turkey tail mushroom along with her chemo-therapeutic agents, and survived beyond anyone's wildest expectations. Here is a film that hopes to do no less than change lives, and by doing so, change the world. There's a beautiful vision here that, I believe, badly needs to be heard and shared. (2018, 80 min, DCP Digital) SP
Yuen Woo-Ping’s DRUNKEN MASTER (Hong Kong Revival)
ArcLight Chicago (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) - Monday, 7:30pm
DRUNKEN MASTER, one of Yuen Woo-Ping’s first directorial efforts, is essentially a showcase for his breathtaking martial arts choreography, with very little narrative filler in between the rousing fight sequences. Jackie Chan stars as Fei-Hung, the spoiled son of a martial arts schoolmaster. When the story begins, Fei-Hung is already an impressive kung-fu fighter—he can even beat up some of the teachers at the school—but he lacks the discipline required of a master. Enter the itinerant Beggar So (the drunken master of the title), who arrives to train Fei-Hung for a year. What follows is a formulaic kung-fu comedy, with Fei-Hung learning concentration, inner strength, and the secret moves that comprise So’s kung-fu of the Eight Drunken Gods. It would be passable if not for the choreography—of which there is plenty—and for Chan’s joyful performance. Like Buster Keaton or Fred Astaire, Chan in his best vehicles uses his body and the world around him to create an ongoing physical music; even when he loses a fight, it’s entertaining to watch him put up the effort, engage with his partner, and take the hits like a pro. The world of DRUNKEN MASTER is tailored perfectly to Chan’s screen persona; everyone is irritable and skilled at kung-fu, and everyone uses fighting to resolve any imaginable issue. The wacky sound effects and score make it feel even more like an old Popeye cartoon, as do character names like Stick King and Iron Head. (1978, 111 min, DCP Digital) BS
Jackie Chan’s POLICE STORY (Hong Kong Revival)
ArcLight Chicago (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) - Tuesday, 7:30pm
The dubbed thwapping of Jackie Chan’s artfully choreographed fight scenes is a form of ASMR I didn’t know existed. His film POLICE STORY (and it's sequel, POLICE STORY 2) is as tranquilizing as it is rousing, a veritable ballet of brutality with elements of comedy and romance thrown into the mix. Recently restored by Janus Films in high-definition 4K, the first film in the Hong Kong superstar’s popular action series is relentlessly entertaining, so much so that it’s almost difficult to critique. Rather, it's best seen as an artifact of Chan’s prodigious career, which is marked by a skillfulness that’s beyond one’s wildest imagination, rendered so flawlessly that it would seem as if anyone could do what he does. Though often compared to Buster Keaton for obvious reasons—some of Chan’s stunts (which the actor famously performs himself) are almost direct corollaries to those of Keaton’s films—Chan is also similar to Keaton in that he’s directed much of his own best work, having made POLICE STORY after working with James Glickenhaus on THE PROTECTOR (also 1985), which was intended but failed to launch Chan’s career in the United States. Ironically, the film, which took Chan back to Hong Kong, premiered at the 1987 New York Film Festival, doing much more than THE PROTECTOR to grow his stateside reputation. In the film, he stars as a young police inspector, Chan Ka Kui, who’s assigned to guard a crime lord’s secretary (Taiwanese icon Brigitte Lin) after she’s strong-armed into testifying against her former boss. The incomparable Maggie Cheung, whose comedic tenor rivals that of Chan’s own, also appears as the inspector’s girlfriend. A Jackie Chan film often feels like skipping a stone across water, each plunk a show-stopping set piece separated by passages of anticipation; that is to say, the plot, while entertaining, is largely filler until the next conflict, which inevitably yields stunts as yet unimaginable to the average moviegoer. Chan eschews the slow-build in favor of immediate, heart-stopping action, destroying a whole shantytown in the first 15 minutes as ceaselessly as he destroys a luxury mall in the last 15 minutes. (1985, 92 min, DCP Digital) KS
Michael Glover Smith's MERCURY IN RETROGRADE (Contemporary American)
Flashpoint Academy (111 W. Washington St., 5th Floor) – Monday, 6:30pm (Free Admission)
When it was first released, I praised Michael Glover Smith’s strong debut, COOL APOCALYPSE, for its subtle dissection of relationships in the inflexion point of their collapse. His sophomore feature, MERCURY IN RETROGRADE, builds upon and expands the earlier title’s strengths, presenting a nuanced and troubling portrait of six people who, over the course of a long weekend, quietly and privately reveal that they are in the process of exploding inside. It is a movie about three good-natured, loveable, charming men who each, in his own insidious way, is a manipulative, dehumanizing sexist, and the three spirited, jovial, smart women who have fallen for them. Built in two rough halves, the first part of MERCURY IN RETROGRADE shows us a deceptively idyllic group friendship, three couples who love one another, understand one another, and love being around one another. They eat, drink, joke, play, and seem to grow together as people. Everything feels wrong, but only with the second part in mind do the tension lines in the first become clear. An extended pair of alcohol-fueled conversations, one all-male at the cabin and the other all-female at a nearby bar, are intricately intercut and woven together, cutting away the pretense of kindness, decency, and equality that the characters have worked so hard to convince themselves of. Set almost exclusively in a palatial cabin in the Michigan woods, the movie’s roving compositions, highly mobile camerawork, and idiosyncratic editing keep placing characters in off-putting juxtapositions, dividing spaces, preventing the six principals from ever fully integrating with the natural world they’re surrounded by. Instead, following Smith’s title, they spin around and are trapped by one another like celestial bodies mere moments before collision. The phrase ‘mercury in retrograde’ itself comes from a term of pseudoscientific bullshittery that attempts to explain away misunderstandings and conflict by blaming it on the different orbital speeds of Mercury and Earth, and is a neatly symbolic way of signaling the viewer that the characters will both argue over important issues with one another and both misunderstand the nature of those arguments and be satisfied with papered-over illusions rather than actual resolution. Indeed, the narrative is awash in oddly revealing moments of internalized oppression and violence that are rationalized away as evidence of love: a throw-away comment one woman makes about convincing a partner to ‘let’ her have an abortion; another woman breaking out of a relationship of physical abuse only to pursue her abuser’s career path; a third whose desperate need to keep her history of violent exploitation, victimization, and addiction secret from her partner drives her to break years of sobriety. Many of the actors deserve special acclaim, especially Jack Newell and Alana Arenas, two local actors who play Jack and Golda, the one couple amongst the three to be married, inhabit their complex roles to a chilling degree. It’s one thing to play a dysfunctional couple, but another level entirely to play one that believes itself to be fully equal and loving. It is a trenchant, beautifully and disturbingly stylized look at misogyny and oppression, neither the first nor the last word on the subject by any means, but a modest and welcome addition to the conversation. Smith in person at all shows. (2017, 105 min, DCP Digital) KB
---
Michael Glover Smith, producer/actor Shane Simmons, and producer Kevin Wright in person.
Howard Alk’s THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON (Documentary Revival)
Rebuild Foundation (at the Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave.) —Saturday, 1, 4, and 7pm (Free Admission)
---
Justice Hotel at 6018NORTH (6018 N. Kenmore Ave.) – Wednesday, 7pm (Free Admission)
While many documentaries can be said to literally ‘document’ history, very few actually capture that hefty substance as it is happening. Examples that come to mind are the Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin’s GIMME SHELTER and, more recently, Laura Poitras’ CITIZENFOUR and RISK. In the former, the filmmakers caught the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter while filming the Altamont Free Concert; in the latter, Poitras depicts real-time revelations from and about Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Howard Alk’s THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON is another, one with a germane timelessness, its themes as urgent as ever. Originally intended as a more straightforward examination of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and its chairman Fred Hampton, THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON, produced by the Chicago Film Group, evolved into something much more pressing and investigative after Hampton was killed during an early-morning raid while the project was underway. It’s effective as it details both the Black Panther ideology (which includes forward-thinking social and education programs, as well as cooperation with other minority groups) and the events surrounding Hampton’s horrific death; the dichotomy created by the unfortunate circumstances is a compelling one. In this way, it was a much-needed antithesis to conservative accounts touted at the time, specifically that which appeared on the front page of the Chicago Tribune—to quote Howard Zinn from his seminal A People's History of the United States, "the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction…that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission." In his review of the film for the New York Times, A.H. Weiler opened with the declaration that “[h]istory is, or should be, recorded after exhaustive contemplation.” Who says? THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON was ahead of its time in its propinquity, reflecting history as a stimulus that demands immediate response. (Weiler eventually concedes this, but let’s consider his lede at face value anyway.) The footage of a prostrate Hampton covered in blood after being dragged off the bed he’d been sleeping in just moments before is much more affecting than the FBI reenactments, however illuminating they may be in their homiletic significance. Fred Hampton was murdered, and this film demands its viewers bear witness to that in such a way that is, sadly, just as relevant now as it was then. (1971, 88 min, Digital Projection) KS
---
The Rebuild Foundation screenings are preceded by the 1989 short video document RIGHT ON: A FRIEND REMEMBERS FRED HAMPTON (18 min).
WHITE/WONDERFUL Double Feature
Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 6pm
---
Michael Curtiz's WHITE CHRISTMAS (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 9pm
Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (American Revival)
Like Steven Spielberg today, Frank Capra was associated more with reassuring, patriotic sentiment than with actually making movies; but just beneath the Americana, his films contain a near-schizophrenic mix of idealism and resentment. In this quality, as well as his tendency to drag charismatic heroes through grueling tests of faith, it wouldn't be a stretch to compare Capra with Lars von Trier. There's plenty to merit the comparison in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE alone: The film is a two-hour tour of an honest man's failure and bottled-up resentment, softened only intermittently by scenes of domestic contentment. Even before the nightmarish Pottersville episode (shot in foreboding shadows more reminiscent of film noir than Americana), Bedford Falls is shown as vulnerable to the plagues of recession, family dysfunction, and alcoholism. All of these weigh heavy on the soul of George Bailey, a small-town Everyman given tragic complexity by James Stewart, who considered the performance his best. Drawing on the unacknowledged rage within ordinary people he would later exploit for Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart renders Bailey as complicated as Capra himself—a child and ultimate victim of the American Dream. Ironically, it's because the film's despair feels so authentic that its iconic ending feels as cathartic as it does: After being saved from his suicide attempt (which frames the entire film, it should be noted), Stewart is returned to the simple pleasures of family and friends, made to seem a warm oasis in a great metaphysical void. (1946, 130 min, DCP Digital) BS
---
Michael Curtiz's WHITE CHRISTMAS (American Revival)
Critics agree that Mark Sandrich's HOLIDAY INN (1942), the first musical comedy to feature Bing Crosby, an inn, and Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," is a better film than this partial remake. Yet it turns out that it's revivals of this Technicolor, VistaVision version that people look forward to this time of year. WHITE CHRISTMAS incorporates the history of its own title song, which, while it would go on to become perhaps history's largest-seller, actually seemed a flop at first. Music historians Dave Marsh and Steve Propes note, "What saved 'White Christmas' were requests made by GIs to Armed Forces Radio around the world. Soldiers away from home, many of them in the South Pacific or North Africa, uncertain of whether they'd ever again see family and friends, let alone a snowfall, responded passionately to Berlin's understated evocation of the mythic romance of Christmas Past." This history is folded into the opening scene: it's Christmas Eve, 1944, somewhere on a World War II battlefield, and Crosby sings the song to fellow troops amidst some very fake rubble, as bombs explode in the background. The movie's got Crosby and Danny Kaye as music-and-lyrics team Wallace and Davis, and Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney as sister act the Haynes. They're a treat to watch even just sitting around a railroad passenger car singing "Snow," bound for Pine Tree, Vermont, where the inn turns out to be run by ex-General Waverly (Dean Jagger). When people gather for a screening of this movie, I doubt they worry that it may not rank with Michael Curtiz's best work (CASABLANCA, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, MILDRED PIERCE). They come to mark the change of years together. If there's a season for nestling in the warmth of nostalgia, it's this one. Plus, there's the camp appeal of Crosby and Kaye doing "Sisters." (1954, 120 min, DCP Digital) SP
ELF/LOVE Double Feature
Jon Favreau's ELF (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 4:45 and 9:45pm
---
Richard Curtis' LOVE ACTUALLY (British Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm
Jon Favreau's ELF (American Revival)
The determining factors of what make a Christmas movie a classic are ambiguous at best. Santa is obviously a common denominator in these films, while the elves usually take a supporting role to his lead. But in Jon Favreau's ELF, one of Santa's not-so-little helpers becomes the main defender against holiday cynicism. Considered a 'new' Christmas classic, it's hard to resist the earnestness of Will Ferrell's Buddy as he travels to New York City from the North Pole, where he was adopted as an elf after crawling into Santa's sack of presents in an orphanage. This might sound like an actual nightmare for most reasonable moviegoers, but Ferrell and friends pull it off. The gags are enjoyable, and the plot is equal parts cynical and hopeful, a perfect mix for those hardened by Capra and made too idealistic by LOVE ACTUALLY. Buddy attempts to find his birth father after discovering that he, at 6'3", was not born an elf, and the holiday cheer is somewhat minimized by the surprisingly dark undertones of that plot point. In an attempt to utilize "old techniques," Favreau used forced-perspective rather than CGI to make Ferrell appear larger than his little elf friends, and several scenes feature the two-frame stop-motion animation familiar from those old-school, made-for-TV holiday character movies. Only time will tell if ELF can pass the test and hold its ranks amongst the veritable classics, but for the time being it suffices as an enjoyable holiday romp. And if a person such as Buddy, who was both unwanted and even bamboozled as a child, can find happiness in the holidays, then maybe there is hope for us all. (2003, 97 min, DCP Digital) KS
---
Richard Curtis' LOVE ACTUALLY (British Revival)
Of the world of modern romantic comedies, so shaped by Richard Curtis' pen (BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY, NOTTING HILL, FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL), I once knew naught. This, despite my great affection for the rom-coms of the 30s and 40s. It took a connoisseur like my wife to clue me in. Upon first viewing LOVE ACTUALLY, Curtis' maiden attempt at wielding the camera, I was scandalized. "Curtis, you have no shame!" I cried. It took repeated administerings over several holiday seasons. Slowly, my amazement grew to fascination, and pretty soon I was clamoring for it as soon as December rolled around. Today, I believe it to be one of the age's great entertainments, a milestone in the canon of UK-US Christmas pop culture. It dawned on me that it was Curtis' utter lack of shame that constituted his greatness. He is completely sincere; he cannot be embarrassed. He achieves moments of real dramatic and psychological verisimilitude, then happily chucks them in favor of fantasy. I began to see the film as a modern, cheerily explicit, sexy equivalent of my cherished P.G. Wodehouse novels. Like Wodehouse, Curtis breezily choreographs a complex farandole of plot and subplot, stacking and spinning ten storylines at once. Even after umpteen viewings, one spots new connections, marvels at Curtis' conducting of the relationships and destinies of a bevy of Londoners, embodied by pleasing players like Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Keira Knightly, Laura Linney and Bill Nighy. LOVE ACTUALLY is a film that even the vinegary David Thomson, in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, calls "a triumph." It will restore your faith in humanity. It's very funny, and it gets you in the mood. My wife reckons that the transcendent detail is the way the "enigmatic" Carl (Rodrigo Santoro) plays with Linney's hair as they dance. In response, I can only muse happily over how much I still have to learn. (2003, 135 min, DCP Digital) SP
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) and the Chicago Film Archives present Revulsion in the Grocery Aisle: Explorations of Consumer Culture on Saturday at 7pm. This program of films from the CFA's collection includes James Benoit's COULD YOU EAT JUST A LITTLE BIT OF SHIT (1975, 7 min, 16mm), Camille Cook's ARRIVAL SUPERMARKET ARCHITECTURE (c. 1967, 9 min, Digital Projection), Tom Palazzolo's JERRY'S DELI (1976, 10 min, 16mm), JoAnn Elam's DAYTIME TELEVISION (c. 1973, 3 min, 16mm), and Kenji Kanesaka’s SUPER UP (1966, 12 min, new 16mm preservation print).
Cinema 53 (at the Harper Theater, 5238 S. Harper Ave.) screens Nia DaCosta’s 2018 film LITTLE WOODS (105 min, Digital Projection) on Thursday at 7pm. Followed by a discussion. Free admission.
PO Box Collective (6900 N. Glenwood Ave.) screens Kidlat Tahimik’s 1981 Filipino film TURUMBA (95 min, Video Projection) on Saturday at 5:30pm. Free admission.
The Graham Foundation (4 W. Burton Pl.) screens Thomas Piper’s 2017 documentary FIVE SEASONS: THE GARDENS OF PIET OUDOLF (75 min, Video Projection) on Thursday at 6pm. Introduced by Laura Ekasetya, director and head horticulturist at the Lurie Garden, Millennium Park. Free admission, but RSVPs requested (www.grahamfoundation.org).
Alliance Française (54 W. Chicago Ave.) screens Bibo Bergeron’s 2011 animated French film A MONSTER IN PARIS (90 min, Video Projection; English-language version) on Saturday at 1:30pm.
The Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio St.) screens Luís García Berlanga’s 1961 Spanish film PLÁCIDO (81 min, DVD Projection) on Tuesday at 7pm. Free admission.
Sentieri Italiani (5430 N. Broadway Ave.) screens Phaim Bhuiyan’s 2019 Italian film BANGLA (84 min, Video Projection) on Saturday at 4pm
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Amp Wong and Ji Zhao's 2019 animated Chinese film WHITE SNAKE (99 min, DCP Digital) begins a two-week run.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Tom Harper’s 2019 UK film THE AERONAUTS (100 min, 70mm) continues; Robert Eggers’ 2019 film THE LIGHTHOUSE (109 min, DCP Digital) is at 9:40pm daily (no Tuesday screening); Noah Baumbach’s 2019 film MARRIAGE STORY (136 min, 35mm) is on Saturday and Sunday at 11:15am; the annual Sing-a-Long SOUND OF MUSIC is on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am; Travis Stevens’ 2019 film GIRL ON THE THIRD FLOOR (93 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday and Saturday at Midnight; Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 film THE ROOM (99 min, 35mm) is on Friday at Midnight, preceded by Evan Powers’ 2019 short PIG (8 min); and Jim Sharman’s 1975 film THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) is on Saturday at Midnight, preceded by Natasha Pascetta’s 2019 short ROAD TRASH (7 min).
Facets Cinémathèque plays Jon Kasbe’s 2018 documentary WHEN LAMBS BECOME LIONS (80 min, Video Projection) and Adam Randall’s 2019 film I SEE YOU (96 min, Video Projection) for week-long runs (no Sunday screenings); and presents Milos Stehlik: A Life in Film, a free open house and day of screenings in tribute to the late Facets founder, on Sunday. Check Facets’ website for additional details.
The Chicago Cultural Center screens Alana DeJoseph’s 2019 documentary A TOWERING TASK: THE STORY OF THE PEACE CORPS (105 min, Video Projection) on Wednesday at 6pm, followed by a discussion. Free admission.
MUSEUM AND GALLERY SHOWS/EXHIBITIONS
The exhibition Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through January 26. The show features a wealth of Warhol’s short films (fifteen “Screen Tests” and other early shorts, which are all showing on 16mm), videos, and television commercials, including some very rare items. A complementary exhibit, Cinema Reinvented: Four Films by Andy Warhol, will showcase four films over the course of the Back Again show’s run, all in 16mm. Warhol’s 1963 film HAIRCUT NO. 1 (27 min, 16mm) is on view through December 8; his 1963 film KISS (54 min, 16mm) is on view December 9-January 5; and his 1967 film TIGER MORSE (34 min, 16mm) is on view January 6-26. The films screen at the top of each hour starting at 11am.
---
The 16mm short films (1963-66, approx. 4-5 min each) showing are: ELVIS AT FERUS, JILL AND FREDDY DANCING, EDIE SEDGWICK (SCREEN TEST 308), ANN BUCHANAN (SCREEN TEST 33), PENELOPE PALMER (SCREEN TEST 255), BIBBE HANSEN (SCREEN TEST 128), NICO EATING HERSHEY BAR (SCREEN TEST 246), ME AND TAYLOR, MARIO BANANA #1, JOHN WASHING, JACK SMITH (SCREEN TEST 315), RUFUS COLLINS (SCREEN TEST 61), BILLY NAME (SCREEN TEST 194), MARCEL DUCHAMP (SCREEN TEST 80), and SALVADOR DALI (SCREEN TEST 67); and the three television commercials are: THE UNDERGROUND SUNDAE (1968, 1 min, Digital Video), CADENCE [STANDING WOMAN] (1965, 1 min, Digital Video), and CADENCE [BOTTLE] (1965, 1 min, Digital Video).
CINE-LIST: December 6 - December 12, 2019
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Scott Pfeiffer, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
