Cine-File continues to cover streaming and other online offerings during this time of covidity.
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NEW REVIEWS
Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman’s EXTRA ORDINARY (Ireland/Belgium)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
The world of EXTRA ORDINARY is a truly charming one, where magical realism reigns and everyone accepts that ghosts and the like are real. Some ghosts are spooky malevolent spirits, but for the most part they just move your trash bins around when you’re trying to sleep or hide the cap to your pens. Like the rest of us, they just want to be noticed. Brilliant Irish comedian Maeve Higgins plays the lead here, the lovely Rose. As a child she was part of an exorcism duo with her father until he died in a ritual gone absurdly wrong. Living with the guilt of his death, Rose swore off all dealings supernatural and instead turned to a straight-laced career as a driving instructor. Still, she gets calls daily from people asking for help with hauntings. After a meet cute with a caller whose daughter has been possessed by a former ‘70s New Age one-hit-wonder musician looking to sacrifice a virgin in a demonic pact for a chance at a second hit (stay with me here...) she decides to get back into the ghost business. She’s looking for redemption and, if she’s lucky, love. There’s definitely a lot going here, but the wonderful acting and crisp script keep everything surprisingly clear. Its wry humor holds it all together and effortlessly leads you along. With clever little jokes such as filling McGuffin’s brand jars with ectoplasm, EXTRA ORDINARY manages to be charming without being precious. There are also some cute winks towards classics like THE EXORCIST and GHOSTBUSTERS, the latter of which this is far more like. In fact I hesitate to call this a horror film in any sense. It’s far more of a supernatural comedy akin to BEETLEJUICE or DEATH BECOMES HER. Yes, there are ghosts and demons and some sex and violence, but so what? It’s also so very warm and twee and full of great slapstick and dry delivery. There’s far more romantic tension than suspense, and EXTRA ORDINARY is a better film for it. It’s the perfect date movie for the strange and unusual. Or for anyone who wishes they could fall in love on Halloween. (2019, 94 min) RJM
Thomas Heise’s HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME (Germany/Documentary/Essay)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
Running nearly four hours and spanning about 100 years, HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME manages to be several things at once: it’s an epic family saga, a national portrait, an experimental essay film, and a rich history compiled from first-hand sources. Writer-director Thomas Heise also serves as the film’s narrator, reading documents by family members both living and dead; the documents are mostly letters and diary entries, but Heise also shares business correspondence and even a surveillance report. The accompanying images tend to be black-and-white landscape shots or shots in color of different documents (though rarely the ones being read on the soundtrack), and these generate a certain meditative calm that allow you to focus on the ideas. The overarching subject is the history of eastern Germany (at one point East Germany) as experienced by Heise’s family over most of the 20th century, beginning in the lead-up to World War I and concluding a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Heise’s pairings of words and images can be hypnotic and powerful, particularly during a half-hour sequence when he reads letters written by his grandmother, who was Jewish, over shots of Nazi records listing Jews who were deported to concentration camps. Heise’s grandmother writes of the Nazis’ round-up of her neighbors and friends; with each letter, the persecution she describes gets closer to home until the letters cease altogether. The story that Heise assembles through these letters is sad, of course, but the never-ending list of names reminds us that the story is just one of millions. Heise strikes this sort of balance throughout HEIMAT, creating a bifocal approach to history in which personal and national concerns sit side by side. It’s a humbling experience in that it inspires you to reflect on how your own family history is shaped by forces beyond individual control; at the same time, the film can be stirring in its sweep and intellectual rigor. (2019, 218 min) BS
Helki Frantzen and Thomas Torres Cordova’s L.A. ROLL (US/Short Documentary)
Available to view for free on the Short of the Week YouTube page
Avid roller skater and documentary cinematographer Helki Frantzen and her co-director, film artist and roller skater Thomas Torres Cordova, combine their two passions in their directorial debut, L.A. ROLL, a fond, but sobering look at the remnants of skate culture in the Los Angeles area. It begins on the final day of Skate Depot, a rink founded in 1984 in suburban Cerritos during the roller-skating boom that accompanied the rise of disco music across the country. Skate Depot, like the hundreds of largely African-American skaters and skate crews that called it their home away from home, has been left behind by changing times and tastes. The loss of community, contact, and a safe place is real, but there are signs of hope on the horizon when another Orange County roller rink encourages the Depot’s stranded clientele to give them a try. If you ever took a spin around the Rainbo Roller Rink in Uptown or any of the many rinks that dotted the American landscape from the 1930s on, this will bring back memories. If you didn’t, then L.A. ROLL’s astonishingly captured, dynamic footage of bodies in creative motion should more than hold your attention. (2019, 18 min) MF
Agnès Varda’s THE LITTLE STORY OF GWEN FROM FRENCH BRITTANY (France)
Available to view for free on the American Cinematheque’s YouTube page
There’s little to celebrate during these times of covidity, but, somehow, even in death, Agnès Varda manages to give us something to be grateful for. That would be a previously unreleased 2008 short film, THE LITTLE STORY OF GWEN FROM FRENCH BRITTANY, put out by the American Cinematheque a few weeks back. Insomuch as Varda’s entire career is extraordinary, this ‘new’ short is yet another extraordinary entry into it—and it’s particularly joyous in its depiction of a life being lived in service to cinema. The title subject is Gwen Deglise, Varda’s longtime friend and Head of Programming at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, and the short film concerns Deglise’s life starting when she met Varda in Paris. Deglise came to Varda’s door, attempting to sell some of her things—including art books—so that she could afford the trip to the states to be with her lover. (I note the bit about art books because it ties in, somewhat tenuously, with another rare Varda film, NAUSICAA, which she made for French television in 1970 and recently streamed on Cinephobe.) In conversation with each other, Varda—who intermittently resided in Los Angeles in the late 60s and early 80s—and Deglise chart the latter’s progression from projectionist in a small cafe-theater (where she once screened Jacques Demy’s BAY OF ANGELS on 16mm) to her rise from assistant programmer to even bigger, better things later on, an affecting subject due to cinemas across the country being shuttered. At just over five minutes, one gleans multitudes about the women and their tender friendship. The short contains many of my favorite Varda hallmarks: ‘re-enactments’ of moments important—or sometimes not—to the story at hand, deliberately constructed as a sort-of inside joke into which the audience is invited to participate; non-sequiturs, often conveyed through voiceover, this time involving an anecdote about filmmaker Patricia Mazuy, who would go to visit Varda while she and Sabine Mamou were editing MUR MURS; and finally… Varda herself, the deliberate inclusion of her delightful, questioning persona. All of Varda’s work is personal, but this feels especially so, a funny valentine to a beautiful friendship. In an open letter accompanying the short film's release, Deglise writes: "Of her many gifts: her curiosity was limitless, her appetite for life boundless. The endless inventiveness of her art shines through in her films and was inspiring to witness, and a privilege to be close to.” (2008, 5 min) KS
Paul Cox’s MAN OF FLOWERS (Australia)
Available to rent on Vimeo
Dutch/Australian filmmaker Paul Cox made sad nostalgia his stock and trade with such films as A WOMAN’S TALE (1991) and INNOCENCE (2000). With MAN OF FLOWERS, Cox examines one man’s painful memories of his budding sexuality and his current battle in late middle-age to reach beyond his cloistered, idealized, but dissatisfying existence. Charles Bremer (Norman Kaye) is a very rich man who lives in a gated mansion filled with fine art and flowers. He appears to leave his home rarely and only to perform a limited number of tasks. He plays the organ at the church across the street, goes to the flower market, takes walks in the park to gaze upon nude bronzes, posts letters daily to his dead mother, takes an art class, and visits his psychiatrist. Into this circumscribed existence are admitted a homespun philosopher of a postman, a clumsy maid, and most recently, a young girl named Lisa (Alyson Best) who we see in the opening scene leave her sketchy neighborhood to go with Charles to his home and strip naked while an aria from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor plays in the background. Her performance rouses him out of his easy chair and over to the church, where his orgasmic cacophony of organ music shakes the church walls. Indeed, this is the only kind of voluntary orgasm Charles has ever known due to a trauma in childhood. Lisa lives with a selfish, cocaine-addicted painter named David (Chris Haywood). One day she shows up for their appointment with a black eye. Charles has already ceased to see her as an anonymous body upon which he can project sexual fantasies. He sees her as his little flower, crying, and “salt water is no good for flowers.” Something must be done to relieve Lisa of the burden of David. The film takes an unexpectedly comic turn that is as delightfully wicked as it is surprising. Watching Charles is, at times, like watching a child, but his innocence is not total. Rather like the guilt-ridden Francis from Atom Egoyan’s EXOTICA (1994) or, indeed, the hero of Lucia di Lammermoor who is the last surviving member of a Scottish clan who lives in an isolated tower by the sea, loneliness has driven him to try to experience some contact and warmth. Cox’s haunting last shot brilliantly communicates Charles’—and all men’s—essential longing. (1983, 91 min) MF
Eliza Hittman’s NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS (US/UK)
Available to rent on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, and other services
It becomes evident early on in NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS, a film about a young woman seeking an abortion, that we’re not going to see or hear from the man who contributed to the unwanted pregnancy. It’s a conspicuous absence that bespeaks Hittman’s straightforwardly feminist attitude and approach, in which the denial of even the possibility of a male-controlled narrative necessarily returns focus and agency to the young woman, whose subjective experience take precedence above all else. The girl is Autumn (newcomer Sidney Flanigan), a diffident seventeen-year-old in rural Pennsylvania. Things are not great for her: at home, her deadbeat stepfather only shows affection for the dog, while on her supermarket shift she and her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) are subjected to ritual workplace harassment. One day, wondering if she’s pregnant, Autumn visits a local clinic and is given an over-the-counter drugstore test (one among many details in the film indicating the sorry state of healthcare in the US). It comes back positive. Discovering that Pennsylvania disallows women under eighteen from getting an abortion without parental consent, Autumn embarks to New York City with Skylar, aiming to have the procedure done with Planned Parenthood. Working in her preferred mode of muted urban realism, Hittman avoids the myriad obvious, didactic dimensions this material might’ve taken on under a different writer-director. This means a narrative devoid of polemics, one that respects Autumn’s journey as the private one she experiences, rather than as the public political lightning rod it becomes in the eyes of a fanatical, patriarchal society. Hittman trusts that it’s enough to simply observe all the mundane socioeconomic and gender barriers Autumn’s forced to endure—something she does with a numbed impassivity suggesting how naturalized such factors are—to understand how stacked the deck is against women’s bodily autonomies. Yet NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS doesn’t advance a sense of hopelessness, and doesn’t, despite its success in capturing vexing bureaucracy and dour milieus, wish to condemn American social welfare as totally broken. Instead, it upholds the necessity of the systems that do work, and betrays a faith in the ability of both collective and individual action to pull through. In the shattering scene that gives the film its title, Autumn is prompted to respond to questions about her sexual past. Flanigan goes from forthcoming to paralyzed with emotion across one viscerally impactful take, her eyes downcast as she tries to hold back tears. She doesn’t have to answer, not to the counselor or to us. It’s her choice. (2020, 100 min) JL
Daniel Roher’s ONCE WERE BROTHERS: ROBBIE ROBERTSON AND THE BAND (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
If Daniel Roher’s ONCE WERE BROTHERS: ROBBIE ROBERTSON AND THE BAND did nothing but play like a well-curated museum exhibit on The Band, that would almost be enough: one of the finest bands in rock history, their music had a profound influence on many lives, including my own. I expected a familiar story, told in a familiar way. What elevates ONCE WERE BROTHERS is its profoundly personal take. Based on group visionary Robbie Robertson’s memoir, Testimony, the film makes a beautifully nostalgic jigsaw puzzle of Robbie’s past. The tale he tells is a painful one, but it is also a story of glorious musical revolutions, and ultimately a deeply moving tribute—and love letter—to his lost friends. It continuously circles back to the central fact of this group, the titular brotherhood. It’s the love you hear in the music’s seemingly bottomless depth of feeling, its profound interplay of instruments and those voices that, as interviewee Bruce Springsteen perceptively notes, “sounded like you’ve never heard them before, and like they’ve always been there, forever and ever.” The film covers the basic story with elegant economy—how in the late ‘50s Robbie, a Toronto teenager, hooked up with rockabilly cat Ronnie Hawkins and his band the Hawks, a group of Arkansans touring in Canada, featuring an ebullient young stick-twirling drummer named Levon Helm. Levon and Robbie became best friends—like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, as interviewee Hawkins, still spry and naughty in his mid-eighties, remembers. By the early ‘60s, the Hawks had absorbed three other Canadians musicians—pianist Richard Manuel, organist Garth Hudson, and bassist Rick Danko. Just kids, they became the hottest white R&B band around; but they were also multi-instrumentalists with an encompassing and original vision—Hudson, remembers Robbie, “understood Muddy Waters and Bach in the same sentence.” Striking out on their own, they ended up backing up Bob Dylan as he went electric, getting booed every night while making some of the most thrilling rock ’n’ roll of the ‘60s, or of any time. Roher recycles D.A. Pennebaker’s footage of that ’66 tour, which is fine with me: I always love seeing it. In 1967 the band moved to Woodstock, to their ugly and beloved Big Pink house, the creative “sanctuary” Robbie had always dreamed of—and the rest is almost history. We hear encomiums, deserved, to Robertson as a great guitarist and a great songwriter: describing Robbie’s cinematic songs, producer Martin Scorsese evokes the short stories of Melville. Still, the film’s theme is unity, the numinous magic by which a band becomes more than the sum of its parts—and how that brotherhood was lost to the diseases of alcoholism and drug addiction, in a morass of car wrecks, disagreements over credits, and personal stagnation. The film is also a tribute to Robbie’s wife Dominique, a French Montrealer whom he met in Paris in the springtime of 1966, and who is a central presence. Ultimately, ONCE WERE BROTHERS wants to leave us on a celebratory note. One wouldn’t know from this film, for example, that Manuel killed himself in 1986. Instead, Roher syncs a memorializing photograph of Manuel to Helm belting out the lyric, “They should never have taken the very best.” Thus, the film movingly repurposes a line I know by heart—which is what, at its best, it does all along. (2019, 102 min) SP
Keola Racela’s PORNO (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
The legendary horror magazine Fangoria and current horror film streaming service of choice Shudder team up to add another entry into the ever increasing pantheon of retro teen comedy-horror films. PORNO is an ‘80s-feeling movie, set in the ‘90s, released in 2020. This horror-comedy revolves around a group of Christian teens working at a wholesome family-friendly movie theater in 1992. As they prepare for an employees-only late-night screening they encounter a weird, drunk old man roaming in one of the theaters. When they try to shoo him out he breaks through a hidden door leading into a basement that houses a long abandoned porno theater. Curious, the teens find a movie from the abandoned theater’s collection to screen. What comes on is a trippy, arty film somewhere between Dario Argento, Kenneth Anger, and Anton LaVey. When what appears to be a satanic ceremony starts showing full frontal nudity, the uptight, straightedge projectionist pulls the plug. Unfortunately it’s too late—the sex demon invoked in the film has already been released into the theater. Tipping his hat to such genre cult favorites as NIGHT OF THE COMET, 976-EVIL, and especially Lamberto Bava’s DEMONS, director Keola Racela plays with the conceit that teenagers, left to their own devices in movie theaters, will inevitably have to handle problems of an apocalyptic size—and quite likely have a John Hughesian emotional breakthrough as well. So while the teen movie aspects may be spot on, as a horror film, there really isn’t much to be scared by here. But I’d like to think that the filmmakers would agree with me saying that’s beyond the point. That the point was to make a fun movie—and PORNO is exactly that. It’s a silly, bloody, fun time. It’s an absolutely punk rock movie. PORNO may play those familiar three chords, but it’s all about the personal style and swagger. It’s playful in its tropishness. Even so, there is one truly outstanding thing about PORNO, and that is the practical effects. So many small budget horror films rely solely on digital effects, thinking that they can go bigger with less money that way. Unfortunately there’s generally a strong case of diminishing returns in that. PORNO avoids a lot of that nonsense with some seriously sick moments of “real” gore. We’re talking multiple cases severed genitalia, here. And I suppose the win goes to the director because I’m laughing right now just thinking about those scenes. Racela manages to make you wince and cringe while still giving you a belly laugh. And in the end that’s all you should want, or expect from a film like PORNO—and it delivers. (2019, 98 min) RJM
Pedro Costa’s VITALINA VARELA (Portuguese)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Pedro Costa has been one of the world’s most important filmmakers for the past quarter of a century. It was therefore surprising that it wasn’t until last year that one of his films, VITALINA VARELA, won the top award at a major festival (Locarno). This deserved honor, coupled with theatrical distribution from the enterprising Grasshopper Films in the U.S., has thankfully upped the great Portuguese director’s profile even further. Over the course of his career, Costa’s unique, poetic style of filmmaking has evolved from working with full screenplays and professional actors (French movie stars Isaach De Bankole and Edith Scob appear in 1994’s CASA DE LAVA) to casting non-professionals to portray some version of themselves (notably Cape Verdean immigrants living in working-class neighborhoods in Lisbon—including Fontainhas, the systematic destruction of which was captured in the director’s 2000 masterpiece IN VANDA’S ROOM). Along the way there have been side trips into documentary filmmaking proper (WHERE DOES YOUR HIDDEN SMILE LIE? and CHANGE NOTHING both document the working lives of artists Costa admires: filmmaking team Straub/Huillet and chanteuse/actress Jeanne Balibar, respectively). VITALINA VARELA, however, feels like something of an apotheosis for Costa—his work in its purest form. Taking its title from the protagonist (and the actress who plays her), VITALINA VARELA is literally the darkest and, arguably, most beautiful film he has yet made. No one knows how to light and frame images like Costa; where most directors film daytime interiors by framing actors against windows, and thus shooting into the light, Costa nearly always frames his subjects against the walls of dark, cave-like interiors, allowing them to be illuminated only by the light entering from windows on the room’s opposite side. Of course, the resulting painterly images would not count for much if Costa’s cinematographic eye wasn’t also focused on a compelling subject. Enter Vitalina Varela, a Cape Verdean woman whose sad story of attempting to join her husband in Portugal after having spent decades apart, but tragically arriving just three days after his death, was first recounted during her brief appearance in Costa’s previous film, 2014’s HORSE MONEY. The lead in that movie, Ventura, returns here in a supporting role as the priest of a ramshackle church whose congregation has long abandoned him—a powerful incarnation that, as Costa has acknowledged, evokes performances from cinema's history as disparate as Claude Laydu in THE DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST and Joel McCrea in STARS IN MY CROWN. But this show ultimately belongs to Vitalina Varela, whose striking physicality and dramatic sotto voce line readings make her one of the most remarkable screen presences of any movie in recent years. Watching this beautiful and resilient woman contend with a crumbling ceiling while taking a shower or, in a ravishing sequence worthy of John Ford, repairing her roof in a windstorm, constituted an authentic religious experience for this viewer. (2019, 124 min) MGS
SUPPORT LOCAL THEATERS AND SERIES
As we wait for conditions to improve to allow theaters to reopen, consider various ways that you can help support independent film exhibitors in Chicago weather this difficult time. Memberships, gift cards, and/or merchandise are available from the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Music Box Theatre, and Facets. Donations can be made to non-profit venues and organizations like Chicago Filmmakers, the Chicago Film Society, South Side Projections, and many of the film festivals. Online streaming partnerships with distributors are making films available via the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Music Box Theatre, and Facets has its own streaming service (see below).
The Gene Siskel Film Center is one of a number of theaters around the country partnering with film distributors to offer new and recently restored films via streaming, with part of the rental cost going to the theaters. The Film Center from Your Sofa: Stay Connected and Stream with Us series features new titles each week through the end of April.
The Music Box Theatre also has partnered with several distributors to offer streaming of films, with part of the rental cost supporting the theater. Check their website for details.
Facets, too, is doing distributor partnerships, and also has a subscription-based streaming service, FacetsEdge, that includes many exclusive titles.
COVID-19 UPDATES
All independent, alternative, arthouse, grassroots, DIY, and university-based venues and several festivals have suspended operations, closed, or cancelled/postponed events through the end of March at least. Here is the most recent information we have, which we will update as new information becomes available:
Asian Pop-Up Cinema – Spring series postponed till the fall
Beverly Arts Center – Closed through the end of March (tentative)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Spring calendar on hold with no definitive start date
Chicago Film Archives – the CFA’s annual “Media Mixer” event, previously scheduled for May, is postponed until late summer (date TBA)
Chicago Film Society – Remaining March and April screenings on their current calendar are postponed, with intentions to reschedule at future dates
Chicago Filmmakers – All screenings postponed until further notice, with the intention of rescheduling at future dates
Comfort Film (at Comfort Station) – Programming cancelled with no set start date
Conversations at the Edge (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) – Remaining programs cancelled, with plans to reschedule at future times
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Spring programming cancelled
Facets Cinémathèque – Closed through April 17 (tentative date)
Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) – No April screenings/events; May programming is wait and see
filmfront – Events postponed until further notice
Gene Siskel Film Center – Closed until further notice
Music Box Theatre – Closed until further notice
The Nightingale – March and April programs postponed
The Park Ridge Classic Film Series (at the Park Ridge Public Library) – Screenings cancelled through the end of March at least
Festivals:
The Cinepocalypse film festival (June) – Postponed with plans to reschedule at a future time
The Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival (March 12-15) - Postponed with plans to reschedule at a future time
The Chicago Latino Film Festival (April 16-30) – Postponed with plans to reschedule at a future time
The Windy City Horrorama festival (April 24-26) – Cancelled; will possibly be rescheduled or reconfigured at a future date
The Chicago Critics Film Festival (May 1-7) – Postponed until further notice
The Chicago Underground Film Festival (June 10-14) – Postponed (tentatively in September)
CINE-LIST: April 24 - April 30, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael Glover Smith