New on our Blog: An interview by Cine-File contributor Michael Glover Smith with local filmmaker John Otterbacher, who produced the 2017 film MOVING PARTS, which screens at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week.
CRUCIAL VIEWING
John Ford's THE SEARCHERS (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Tuesday, 7pm
The greatest western ever made is also arguably the greatest American movie ever made. Before filming began, director John Ford described THE SEARCHERS as "a kind of psychological epic" and indeed his complex take on the settling of the West, with its head-on—and daringly ahead-of-the-time—examination of racism, finds an appropriately complex and tragic anti-hero in the character of the mysterious Ethan Edwards (John Wayne in his best and most nuanced performance). Spurred on by an unrequited love for his deceased sister-in-law (Dorothy Jordan), the maniacal, Indian-hating Edwards will stop at nothing to recapture his nieces who have been kidnapped by Comanche Indians. "We'll find 'em," Ethan says in one of many memorable lines of dialogue written by Frank S. Nugent but worthy of Herman Melville, "just as sure as the turning of the earth." The dialectic between civilization and barbarism posited by Ford, with Ethan standing in a metaphorical doorway between them, would have an incalculable effect on subsequent generations of filmmakers—from Martin Scorsese to misguided Ford-hater Quentin Tarantino. If you've never seen THE SEARCHERS, or if you've only seen it on home video, you owe it to yourself to catch it projected on 35mm: both the breathtaking Monument Valley vistas and the minute details of the film's production design (e.g., the "Confederate States of America" logo on Ethan's belt buckle), gloriously captured by Winton Hoch's splendiferous VistaVision cinematography, only really come through on the biggest of big screens. (1956, 119 min, 35mm) MGS
Stanley Kwan’s ROUGE (Hong Kong Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Tuesday, 9:30pm
ROUGE, Stanley Kwan’s masterful third feature, alternates between the 1930s and the 1980s, and one thing that makes the film so provocative is how it suggests that the virtues of both eras are inseparable from their faults. The narrative begins in 1934 and charts the budding romance between Fleur (Anita Mui), a “flower girl” in a high-class bordello, and Chan (Leslie Cheung), a wealthy layabout who becomes smitten with her. Kwan seduces viewers into the bygone environment with rich colors and graceful camera movements, creating the sense that the cloistered world of the bordello teems with passion. (The opening sequence, though less flamboyant than the gorgeous tracking shots that follow, is quite evocative too, as Kwan presents a series of brief shots, punctuated by black-outs, of Fleur applying make-up to her face. The black-outs heighten the seductive power of the images by infusing them with an air of mystery.) After roughly twenty minutes of the period romance, Kwan flashes forward unexpectedly to 1987; the Hong Kong skyline, now populated with skyscrapers, feels strangely banal in contrast to the interiors of the opening scenes. The establishing shots give way to a newspaper office, where Yuen-Ting (Alex Man) says goodnight to Ah Chor (Emily Chu), his coworker and girlfriend of four years. Once Ah Chor leaves, Fleur appears, looking no different than she did 53 years earlier, and asks Yuen-Ting to place a personal ad in the newspaper saying she’s returned to Hong Kong to find Chan. Several scenes later she reveals that she’s returned from the dead—the lovers committed suicide in the ‘30s because they couldn’t be together in life, though Chan, for reasons Fleur doesn’t understand, never joined her in the underworld. From here, ROUGE becomes a mystery as well as a ghost story, as the modern-day journalists try to find out what happened to Chan’s spirit so Fleur can be at peace. The journalists’ investigation causes them to question their own relationship: Are we passionate enough to die for each other? And if not, does this represent a failure of emotion on our part? Kwan hints at a dearth of passion in contemporary society through his presentation of it; the scenes in 1987 are notably devoid of the beautiful stylization that crowns the scenes in 1934. This isn’t to say that ROUGE is a condemnation of the present or a valorization of the past. Rather, the film is a complex meditation on the forces of love and history, one, which suggests that an eternal tragedy of human experience is that these two forces are seldom in sync. (1987, 96 min, 35mm) BS
Ernst Lubitsch’s THE STUDENT PRINCE IN OLD HEIDELBERG (Silent American Revival)
The Chicago Film Society and the Music Box Theatre (at the Music Box) — Saturday, 11:30am
The famed “Lubitsch Touch”—a phrase that's part public relations ploy and part critical crutch, one which aims to concretize the indefinable qualities that make Ernst Lubitsch’s films distinguishable from all others—is, in actuality, just the extraordinary talent evidenced by his films, even his most discernible outliers. One of Lubitsch’s last silent films, THE STUDENT PRINCE IN OLD HEIDELBERG, is such an outlier and certainly still has the qualities that comprise said Touch. Prior to this, Lubitsch had been making films at Warner Bros., bringing to the studio prestige but not necessarily the box-office returns to match it; his contract was then taken over by Paramount and MGM. He made STUDENT PRINCE for the latter studio, which provided him with more resources than he’d had previously. The result is a so-called “big picture” that, as with any Lubitsch film, exudes the ease of the German master’s artistry. Based on Wilhelm Meyer-Förster’s play Old Heidelberg and earlier novel Karl Heinrich (though the first part of its title was inspired by a Broadway operetta called The Student Prince that opened three years earlier), the film conveys seriousness bordering on sentimentality; the tone marks a departure for Lubitsch, who needed to prove he could appeal to the masses, rather than go over their heads with a sly sophistication that often eluded them. Latin lover Ramon Novarro stars as Crown Prince Karl Heinrich, who’s sent, along with his beloved tutor, Dr. Jüttner, to study at Heidelberg, the German university. There he finds things that he’d missed out on as a child: friends, in the way of a hard-drinking student society, and romance, in the way of barmaid Kathi, played by Norma Shearer. (It’s worth noting that Lubitsch didn’t like either Novarro or Shearer, though I think both give excellent performances.) The film takes a turn when the King, Karl’s uncle, reveals to Jüttner that he’s chosen a princess for Karl to marry. Jüttner declines to tell Karl, reluctant to infringe upon the Prince’s newfound happiness, though Karl discovers the news when he goes to see his ailing uncle. Later the King and Jüttner pass away, and Karl must assume his duties as the King’s heir. When a college friend comes to see Karl, he's inspired to visit Heidelberg one last time. What follows is a series of devastating scenes on par with any from Lubitsch’s more characteristic films; the director reportedly had to battle with MGM to retain the sublimely bleak ending. Lubitsch embraced the project (which had been rejected by Erich von Stroheim) as a departure, telling an interviewer at the time, “I got tired of frothy French farce comedies—and maybe the public is tired of those too… I tried for simplicity. It’s a tender, romantic story, and I treated it that way.” Despite these comments, the film retains touches of the trademark style that any Lubitsch aficionado will recognize, most notably his cultivated sense of humor and hints of sexuality beneath the sentimentality, which come through in the otherwise uncharacteristic scene on a hillside. (Rumor had it that John M. Stahl reshot the sequence, but the film’s editor, Andrew Marton, said Lubitsch reshot it himself and still didn’t like it.) Also apparent is the emphasis on the class dynamic between Karl and Kathi, a theme often explored in Lubitsch’s work. Here, however, the director doesn’t play it for laughs, but for anguish—theirs is an insurmountable lot. (1927, 105 min, 35mm) KS
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Preceded by Walter Lantz and Clyde Geronimi’s 1925 cartoon THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS (9 min, 16mm). Live accompaniment by Dennis Scott.
Juraj Herz’s THE CREMATOR (Czech Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 3pm and Wednesday, 6pm
In every aspect, Slovak filmmaker Juraj Herz’s soot-black satire THE CREMATOR is exemplary, beginning with the central performance by Rudolf Hrusínský. His Kopfrkingl is a glib, ambitious mortician, driven by familial piety and dubious moral rectitude to spread the gospel of cremation (and, bizarrely, of Tibetan Buddhist theories of reincarnation) among his fellow countrymen in the months leading up to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. A teetotaler, a lover of music, and a friend to animals, Kopfrkingl is a self-styled “sensitive soul,” initially indifferent to the growing influence of the Nazi party in his community; he’s also a perv and a scoundrel, lured away from his “blissful” marriage towards fascism by the promise of topless Teutonic blondes. To this revolting specimen of bourgeois sanctimony, kitsch, and prurience, Hrusínský brings unflagging intelligence, gestural precision, and buried wit, offering a far more textured study of fascism’s flat affect than the pantomime of Bertolucci’s similarly-themed THE CONFORMIST. Adapted from a novel by Ladislav Fuks, THE CREMATOR retains a literary quality, but Herz does more than cinematically embalm the letter of Kopfrkingl’s self-flattering monologues; the film is a wall-eyed carnival of style, with brilliant montages, shrewd zooms, innovative sonic effects, and thickly sedimented mise-en-scene. With these effects, Herz seeks always to reveal character rather than to demonstrate mastery for its own sake. Even the film’s most glaring artifices—the ingenious linkages that pivot from scene to scene around spatial ambiguities and repeated motifs—heighten our sense of confinement within Kopfrkingl’s deluded psyche. Films of the Czech New Wave exist on a spectrum from surreality to satire to sobriety; in some ways, the stylistic delirium of THE CREMATOR shares more with fantasias like Věra Chytilová’s DAISIES and Jaromil Jireš’ VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS than with other Holocaust-themed character studies like Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’ THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. But the anarchic exuberance of DAISIES and the authoritarian grotesque of THE CREMATOR are best understood as mirror expressions of the driving force behind the Czech New Wave: the irruption of desire as a function of politics. The New Wave was the effect of a post-Stalinist cultural “thaw” in the Eastern Bloc, an astonishing (if painfully brief) outpouring of personal expression that unleashed both dreams and nightmares—often, stories about the delightful and horrifying effects that unrepressed desires can have when brought into the open. Coming at the very end of the thaw—shooting began before, and was completed in secret after, the arrival of Soviet forces in Prague in 1968, the event which marked the end of the Prague Spring and the return of brutal repression—THE CREMATOR understands, and plays brilliantly upon, the political ambiguity of Kopfrkingl’s conflicted desires for respectability, authority, and uninhibited depravity. How else could a man justify genocidal mass murder as an act of Buddhist benevolence—and believe it? (1969, 95 min, DCP Digital) MM
William Friedkin’s BUG (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 8pm
Multitalented playwright/actor/director Tracy Letts has been most visible lately in smallish, scene-stealing roles in films as varied as LITTLE WOMEN (2019), FORD V FERRARI (2019), and THE POST (2017). Through much of the ’90s and ’00s, however, he spent his time writing plays and acting on stage. His 1996 play Bug was workshopped at Chicago’s A Red Orchid, with the theatre’s cofounder Michael Shannon starring, before its world premiere at London’s Gate Theatre. It seems only natural that the Chicago-based Letts and Shannon would turn to another Chicagoan best known for a little horror movie called THE EXORCIST (1973) to turn Letts’ screenplay of Bug into a film. While THE EXORCIST was a shock-and-awe kind of horror film, in BUG director William Friedkin shows his mastery of psychological horror as well. BUG uses an unseen threat to terrorize its female protagonist, Agnes White (Ashley Judd), a depressed, drink-and-drug-addled bartender who lives in a seedy motel kitchenette in Oklahoma. Her days are spent sleeping off the night before, which generally involves partying with her friend R.C. (Lynn Collins). Agnes spends a typical night in her room getting drunk and high with R.C., while a man R.C. brought spends an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom. R.C. leaves. When Agnes learns that the man has no place to go, she invites him to sleep on the couch. In the morning, Agnes wakes to the smell of coffee and an empty room. The shower is going. When she goes to the bathroom to thank her guest, she is greeted by the tattooed, threatening figure of her ex-husband, Jerry Goss (Harry Connick, Jr.), only weeks out of prison. Just then, Agnes’ guest returns with breakfast in hand. Jerry confronts him, slaps Agnes, and leaves. Before doing so, he learns that the man’s name is Peter Evans (Shannon). This is the first time we’ve heard it, too. Agnes sits down to a bran muffin and vodka and coke with Peter, feeling protected and cared for. Her contentment is shattered when Peter announces that people are after him because he is an escapee from military biological experiments and that he has to leave to protect her. Agnes, moved by his desperate story, runs into his arms. They make love in a psychedelic scene, interspersing naked bodies with microscopic views of blood flowing through veins and arteries. Afterward, Peter says he has been bitten by an insect. He examines her sheets with a table lamp and finds an aphid. He instructs her about the power of this tiny bug. We will see exactly how powerful as the film moves through Peter’s paranoia and Agnes’ dependency to a chilling, almost apocalyptic end. Agnes is a borderline personality dealing with a tragedy and is hopelessly lonely, perfect prey for a parasite like Peter. Because of the episodic nature of the film, we don’t watch Agnes move slowly into Peter’s delusions, and this creates the shock Friedkin mined so effectively in THE EXORCIST. But the shock is more like meeting someone you haven’t seen for a while and finding them skeletally thin or filthy and deranged. Letts adeptly taps the mania of American conspiracy theories with some ideas many audience members may wholeheartedly believe or at least find somewhat plausible. Thus, he shines a light on of our own gullibility and distrust. Ashley Judd gives this role her all. She looks extremely unglamorous in the beginning, softening upon experiencing some kindness from Peter, and descending into self-loathing and delusion by the film’s climax. Having said that, Letts clearly wrote an actors’ showcase; at times, I felt lost in the zeal with which Judd struts her stuff. Shannon plays his role as an oddball from the word go, but modulates his descent into madness at an even pace. His focus on Agnes is total and mesmerizing, a Svengali for the self-destructive. Lynn Collins and Harry Connick Jr. are both wonderful, creating fully fleshed supporting characters who seem more in control than Agnes, but are in way over their heads when dealing with Peter. And what about us? The ride BUG takes us on is as exhilarating as it is absurd. Watching Peter and Agnes examine their blood for bugs using a toy microscope is ridiculous, but we can’t stop them from seeing what they want to see. Reduced to almost a primitive state at the end, Peter and Agnes horrify us as much as they sadden us. (2006, 102 min, 35mm) MF
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Playwright/screenwriter Tracy Letts and actor Michael Shannon in person.
Amy Heckerling’s FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight
There are few filmmakers who understand the rip-roaring vigor of high school quite like Amy Heckerling does in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH. Her debut feature, adapted from Cameron Crowe’s undercover exposé about teenage life at Clairemont High School, somehow is just as relevant today as it was in the early eighties. No matter how much we evolve as a society, or how much the film industry evolves, high school will always be kind of the same. You’ll work a shitty part time job, you’ll date a boy who finishes too soon, you’ll listen to bad music that feels like the greatest thing in the whole world, you’ll get high with your friends and skip class every once in a while. FAST TIMES is cringey and a little embarrassing, sure, but it captures those truisms of high school. The lasting appeal of FAST TIMES is due to how well it embraces the highs, lows, and just plain banality of adolescence with real charm. Sean Penn, as the aloof, smiley stoner Jeff Spicoli, is the beating heart of the film, but the entire cast brings an endearing naïveté to the typical high school comedy. FAST TIMES is the rare film that both feels like a time capsule and that is still universally understandable. (1982, 90 min, 35mm) CC
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Vincent Sherman’s THE HARD WAY (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7 and 9pm
A melodrama with tinges of noir, THE HARD WAY features one of actress Ida Lupino’s most formative roles. Helen (Lupino) chafes at her poor, day-to-day way of life, secretly pining for something better. She uses her sister Katie (Joan Leslie), encouraging her to follow her aspirations to be an actress and pushing her into a marriage, as a means for her own escape. Naturally, the film revolves around Helen and Katie’s escalating sibling rivalry, with one overbearing verging on oppressive mother and the other exemplifying the naiveté of youth. THE HARD WAY is an excellent character study about the dangers of ambition and exploitative behavior. Director Vincent Sherman’s film is expertly shot by famed cinematographer James Wong Howe, whose dreamy and claustrophobic visual style complements the film’s flashback-heavy narrative. Sherman’s film is one that delves deep into the very nature of sisterly rivalry and anticipates later, and better-known, works like WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? THE HARD WAY makes a strong case for Lupino as a great actress and, as one of the premier feminist films of the 1940s, looks forward to her own feminist directorial efforts of the 1950s. (1943, 109 min, 16mm) KC
Leontine Sagan's MÄDCHEN IN UNIFORM (German Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 6:15pm, Monday, 7:45pm, and Thursday, 6pm
The story of a fourteen year old girl's relationship to both her teacher and her headmistress at a traditional German boarding school, Leontine Sagan's MÄDCHEN IN UNIFORM is a film marked both by controversy and multiple stages of critical assessment. Although popular in Europe upon release in 1931, the film was banned both in the US (to be released only after significant cuts) and by Goebbels following the Nazi assumption of power. It was not shown again in Germany until a 1977 television broadcast, while screenings at New York and Chicago women's film festivals in the mid-70s generated a significant reevaluation of the film, heralding it as a landmark of queer cinema, with some suggesting that it may be the first film with an openly lesbian storyline. In his seminal survey of Weimar cinema, From Caligari To Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer reads the film as a progressive response to the rising tide of fascism that was to overtake Germany in 1933. Despite its abstention from the expressionism that dominated the 1920s, Kracauer sees MADCHEN, along with films like DOCTOR MABUSE and THE CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI, as exploring ideas of despotism and rebellion, with the tyrants of their story lines as nothing less than prefigurations of Hitler. MÄDCHEN's anti-fascism dominates much of the early commentary on the film, which sees it as a critique of the authoritarianism of the Prussian school system and an exploration of the emotional ramifications of life under dictatorship. However, such a reading obscures the film's palpable lesbian cadence. As B. Ruby Rich has written, "...most important to the film's reputation through the years has been its significance as an anti-authoritarian and prophetically anti-fascist film...In emphasizing the film's progressive stance in relation to the Nazi assumption of power, however, film historians have tended to overlook, minimize, or trivialize the film's central concern with love between women...One of the few films to have an inherently gay sensibility, it is also one of the most central to establishing a history of lesbian cinema." (1931, 87 min, DCP Digital) EB
David Lynch's ERASERHEAD (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
"It's my PHILADELPHIA STORY. It just doesn't have Jimmy Stewart in it." In Lynch's debut feature, a man and a woman conceive a monstrous child somewhere in between suburban alienation and industrial rot, a mostly conventional situation with the most grotesque punchline. Watching ERASERHEAD now feels like wandering through a nightmare more than ever, due in part to its central conceit and the expected barrage of disturbing events and images that it entails--distended faces, animal carcasses, etc.—but even the film's few familiar features add to this dreamlike quality. For example, most of ERASERHEAD takes place in an apartment building whose lobby is recognizable as the Other Place from Twin Peaks, and its checkerboard floors trigger a series of half-conscious connections, the common dream trope of a location playing the role of another location. But for every fact we know about the film's production, we're equally uncertain about what it is we're actually looking at, including the creature-child itself, whose uncertain origins have inspired theories that claim it as everything from a cow fetus to an elaborate puppet. Then, amidst this uncertainty, the film's most destabilizing quality emerges: its sweetness. As the father, Jack Nance has a constant wide-eyed, beleaguered stare that is almost as infantile as the creature-child that he tends to, ambivalently at first and then urgently as soon as he sees it in distress. It's effectively moving for the same reason that it's effectively dreamlike, with conscious logic and psychological realism applied to unreal conditions. But because Lynch's mind doesn't seem to format in the conditional or hypothetical, this aspect of unreality is always underlined as literal, so that the scenario of a largely silent father figure demonstrating real concern over his freak spawn is never played as what would happen but what is happening, shifting the focus onto affect and away from conditions. The silhouette of Nance's head has become a visual shorthand for the film, and is also emblematic in many ways of this oddly bound logic; it's shape is both inexplicable and inevitable, and the only place is could possibly make sense is on the floor of a pencil factory, which is exactly where it ends up. (1977, 89 min, DCP Digital) AO
Sidney Lumet's NETWORK (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 7pm
A common complaint among detractors of NETWORK is encapsulated by this customer review found on Amazon: "My apologies to this movie's many diehard fans, but I've always had a problem with Paddy Chayefsky's work. Nobody...and I mean NOBODY...actually talks like his characters, so the plaudits he routinely receives for his 'realism' are a mystery to me ... plunge into the purple thicket of dialogue for yourself and see. But pack a machete; you may need to do a lot of hacking to get back to daylight." These same charges were often leveled against Rod Serling's work, another writer who came of age during the golden age of live television drama in the 1950's. That line of criticism misses the point. Serling's best Twilight Zone episodes and Chayefsky's screenplay for NETWORK still resonate precisely because of the "purple thicket of dialogue." Of course Chayefsky's characters don't talk like "real" people; they talk the way that Chayefsky wished they could talk, replete with virtuosic articulations of their inner philosophy. And of course the brilliant performances of William Holden, Faye Dunaway, and especially Peter Finch vividly bring those words to life. Ned Beatty's famous speech on corporate cosmology is a tour de force, the prescience of which each succeeding generation discovers for itself—like the rest of the movie, it's as timely now as it was during the Me Decade. (1976, 121 min, Digital Projection) RC
Henry Hathaway's CALL NORTHSIDE 777 (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Monday, 7pm
This realist noir based on the true story of an unsolved murder that happened here in Chicago in 1932 is probably most interesting to audiences of today for its use of real locations. As Arnie Bernstein notes in his book Hollywood on Lake Michigan: 100 Years of Chicago and the Movies, the killing happened six months before the "Century of Progress" World's Fair was to take place, so mayor Anton Cermak wanted the mess to be cleaned up without delay and by any means necessary. Two guys of dubious guilt were quickly caught, tried, and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. This 1948 dramatization was shot all over Chicagoland, featuring many spots on the south side; downtown at a police station, the Chicago River, and the Wrigley Building; at the actual delicatessen where the murder took place, 4312 S. Ashland; in one of the participants’ actual apartments at 725 S. Honore; Stateville Correction Center in Joliet, IL (made famous by the prison scenes in NATURAL BORN KILLERS); the old State Capitol Building in Springfield; and at 3501 S. Lowe, the police station where the main character—a reporter played by Jimmy Stewart—holds his investigation. Filmed in stark black and white, and with a documentary feel by cinematographer Joseph MacDonald (BIGGER THAN LIFE, WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER?) and director Henry Hathaway (whose, "quiet, functional camera style suggests some of the classic simplicity of Hawks," according to Dave Kehr), CALL NORTHSIDE 777 is one of the definitive Chicago movies, using the city just as well as three of the city’s best native products—John Hughes's FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF, Michael Mann's THIEF, and Andrew Davis's ABOVE THE LAW. Keep an eye out for the man who operates the lie detector, Leonarde Keeler: the actual inventor of the polygraph device. (1948, 111 min, Digital Projection) KH
Greta Gerwig’s LITTLE WOMEN (New American)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
As one of literature’s greatest hits, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women has been an endless source of identification for generations of girls. But do the four March sisters still have something to offer to modern women who live comfortably in a gender-fluid, marriage-optional world that is far removed from the types of constrictions Alcott’s characters faced? Perhaps we haven’t come as far as we think, if the considerable appeal of Greta Gerwig’s version of LITTLE WOMEN is any indicator. Gerwig has done a masterful job of scrambling the timeline of the story, beginning with Jo (Saoirse Ronan) selling her first story to a Boston newspaper, thus announcing a fresh take on the familiar story for a new generation. Gerwig creates an energetic, teeming mise-en-scène in which the sisters’ actions are much more relatable and real. Meg (Emma Watson), for example, is much less the staid and proper sister in this version, even voicing her frustration with her marriage to a man of modest means. The biggest shift Gerwig, as screenwriter, has made is moving Jo into a less commanding position and focusing more attention on Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) and Amy (Florence Pugh). I surmise this was done to play to Chalamet’s fan base, but it also downshifts the message of independence Jo has always represented to wallow in the excess of Downton Abbey-style riches. Also jarring was a Friedrich Bhaer played with a pronounced French accent by dreamy Louis Garrel, son of French director Philippe Garrel. Was the good professor Alsatian after all? And not to quibble, but could Gerwig not have found a single American actress to play the American March sisters? While Gerwig’s LITTLE WOMEN has not dislodged Gillian Armstrong’s emotionally resonant 1994 version from my heart, it is a worthy adaptation by one of our most gifted filmmakers. (2019, 134 min, 35mm) MF
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) screens Garson Kanin’s 1940 film MY FAVORITE WIFE (88 min, 35mm archival print) on Wednesday at 7:30pm. Preceded by Tex Avery’s 1941 cartoon HOLLYWOOD STEPS OUT (7 min, 16mm).
Filmfront/Inga (1740 W. 18th St.) screens Katarzna Guzowska’s 2011 short film SOIL LISTEN as part of Soil-Look, Soil-Listen, a workshop with artists and ecologist Nance Klehm, on Monday at 7pm.
The Beverly Arts Center screens Kenneth Branagh’s 2018 UK film ALL IS TRUE (101 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 7:30pm.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Don Millar's 2018 documentary BOTERO (83 min, DCP Digital) and Kasi Lemmons' 2019 film HARRIET (125 min, DCP Digital) both play for a week; Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's 2019 UK documentary HE DREAMS OF GIANTS (85 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 2pm, Sunday at 3pm, and Wednesday at 8pm; Terry Gilliam's 2018 Spanish/Belgian/French film THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE (132 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 3:45pm and Sunday at 4:45pm; Emilie Upczak's 2017 Trinidadian and Tobagonian film MOVING PARTS (77 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 8pm, Monday at 6pm, and Tuesday at 8:30pm, with director Emilie Upczak in person at the Friday screening and local producer John Otterbacher in person at the Friday and Tuesday screenings; Martin Šulík's 2009 Czech Republic/Slovakian documentary GOLDEN SIXTIES: JURAJ HERZ (57 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 5pm and Tuesday at 6pm, preceded by Herz's 1965 Czech short THE JUNK SHOP (31 min, DCP Digital); and George Bogdanich's 2019 documentary BETRAYAL: WHEN THE GOVERNMENT TOOK OVER THE TEAMSTER'S UNION (70 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 7:30pm and Thursday at 7:45pm, with Director George Bogdanich in person at both screenings.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Michael Apted’s 2019 UK documentary 63 UP (144 min, DCP Digital) continues.
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 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.
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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: January 3 - January 9, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Erika Balsom, Rob Christopher, Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, Marilyn Ferdinand, Kalvin Henely, Michael Metzger, Anne Orchier, Michael Glover Smith