Cine-File continues to cover streaming and other online offerings during this time of covidity. We will list/highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that have reopened, and list streaming/online screenings below. Cine-File takes no position on whether theaters should be reopening, nor on whether individuals should be attending in-person. Check the venues’ websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place.
PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Kris Rey’s I USED TO GO HERE (New US)
Music Box Theatre — Friday-Thursday, Check Venue website for showtimes; also available to rent here
Someone finally made it. And thank god it was Kris Rey. Up until now, nearly every film dealing with millennials has been stuck delivering the same tired avocado toast jokes or has been a nostalgic trip back to high school or the rosy days of the pre-2008 financial meltdown. With I USED TO GO HERE, Rey handles, with aplomb, what it’s like to be in your late-30s in the present day. Gillian Jacobs plays author Kate Conklin, the writer of a terrible novel who is invited back to her alma mater by a former professor to give a reading. Returning to her college (the barely veiled Southern Illinois University, the actual alma mater of the writer-director and where the film was partially shot), Kate finds that she loses herself in a mire of self-doubt and aimlessness. All her friends back in Chicago are having babies, her fiancé has left her, and she’s been asked to take a teaching position at her old college. The idea of the Baby Boomer hating their steady corporate job and buying a sports car in a mid-life crisis is long dead and an impossibility for a generation that has lived through two financial crises; instead, Rey shows us what it's really like for someone having a life crisis in 2020. Kate Conklin considers going back to early adulthood and shirking the life she once had. As an alum of SIU myself who attended the school the same time Rey did, I absolutely understand this. In fact, I actually did this myself. I moved back to Carbondale for five years and went back to school. And I am far from the only person to have done it. Many people have written songs about the town being a black hole. It truly is a charming, bucolic, insidious place that way. Sigh. But anyway… besides making a film that understands the realities of adult-millennial weltschmerz, the manner in which Rey shows Conklin’s regression from self-assured adult to college-age ball of insecurities is masterful. I USED TO GO HERE begins as a straightforward dramatic comedy, replete with Girl Boss energy, but soon Rey not only plays with, but subverts, the entire style of the film until you find yourself in the back of a van full of college kids alongside Conklin, as the film switches from thirtysomething dramedy into a by-the-book college comedy film as Kate slowly befriends the college students who live in her old house across the street from the bed and breakfast where she’s staying. There are absurd revenge schemes and sexual tension played for laughs. Soon, Kate gets caught up in the drama of college life, friend groups, infidelity, and sexual power dynamics. While the details of her story aren’t necessarily universal, the way Rey maneuvers through them definitely are. Even when the film plays the generational clichés for laughs, it does so with an honesty that is more self-reflective than cheap exploitation. Also, this is the first movie that has some straight-up Millennial/Zoomer love going on, and I thoroughly appreciate that. As we reach our 40s, it’s those in their 20s that are going to be doing all the heavy lifting—culturally, socially, politically. Rey does a wonderful job of showing that, through the friendship and support this group of college kids gives. It’s genuinely heartwarming. (2020, 86 min) RJM
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More info (including COVID policies) at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Tim Burton's PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (US Revival)
Music Box Theatre — Friday-Thursday, Check Venue website for showtimes
By 1985, Paul Reubens' bow-tied TV man-child Pee-wee Herman had claimed a successful stage run, HBO series and specials, and sold-out performances at Carnegie Hall. The culmination of this popularity was PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE. The premise of the BIG ADVENTURE is simple: Pee-wee's beloved bike, an awesome cherry-red cruiser, has disappeared and, bindle in hand, Pee-wee sets across the country to recover it, come what may. In store for Pee-wee are phantom adventures on the American highway, a trip to the Alamo, and the hazards of a thousand other oddball incidents, leading to a roaring, studio-crashing finale that rivals the best of Mel Brooks. PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE is of course the feature debut of Tim Burton, who is perhaps the perfect directorial match for Reubens' funhouse comedy, and the film offers the curious objects, candy colors, and spoiled suburban malaise that have since become the hallmarks of Burton's all-too successful career. Some of the comedy has become even more relevant and complex (and unintentionally ironic) as the years have gone by, such as when Dottie asks Pee-wee if he would like to take her to the movies: Pee-wee responds that there are things she doesn't know about him—"Things you wouldn't understand, things you couldn't understand...Things you shouldn't understand." The two do eventually end up at the movies together, but thankfully Dottie and the audience are spared a TAXI DRIVER moment. (1985, 90 min, DCP Digital) LN
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More info (including COVID policies) at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Also screening at the Music Box this week: Brad Bird’s 1999 animated film THE IRON GIANT (90 min, DCP Digital) and Dave Franco’s 2020 film THE RENTAL (74 min, DCP Digital).
CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL — BEST OF CUFF
The Chicago Underground Film Festival presents a month-long online retrospective, Best of CUFF, continuing through August 28, which includes at least 21 features and 14 shorts programs. All programs will be available for streaming for the run of the retrospective. Passes are $30 and individual programs are a suggested $10 (or pay what you can). Reviews of select programs are below, and we’ll be running additional new and rerun reviews each week. Full details at www.cuff.org.
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Shorts Program One
The five shorts in this collection occupy an interesting middle ground between narrative and avant-garde cinema; all of them tell stories or at least hint at them, but the narrative through line of each tends to be overshadowed by experimental filmmaking techniques. Opening the program is local filmmaker Jim Vendiola’s VIOLETS (2015, 13 min), which is the most story-driven of the five selections. This dialogue-free short follows two women who wear similar-looking hairstyles, plaid skirts, button-down tops, and glasses, though we never learn whether they’re sisters, lovers, or close friends (regardless, their outfits speak to a personal, if not private symbology on the director’s part). After some lovely shots of the women walking through the Garfield Park Conservatory, Vendiola switches focus to their cloistered home life, employing little camera movement and fastidious compositions to underscore the women’s commitment to order. That order gets disrupted in a grand, violent way, which I won’t spoil here, suffice it to say that Vendiola presents the development in the same exacting manner he advances through the rest of the film. The uniform style is unsettling and somewhat funny. Christopher Lange’s HOME NEAR WATER (2014, 13 min) is another domestic drama that gives way to horror, though Lange hints at a dark undercurrent throughout, changing unpredictably between film and video formats and deliberately obscuring whether he’s adopting an objective or subjective point of view. The film seems to be about the breakdown of communication within a marriage. Lange returns a few times to an uncomfortable dinner between a husband and wife, showing different possible outcomes to their conversation; the variations hint at the divide between how the couple wants the conversation to proceed versus how it actually does. Apart from some distinctive body horror, HOME NEAR WATER contains memorable imagery in the form of lonely shots of a Chinese buffet and an unexpected superimposition of fireworks over a shot of fish. WANING (2011, 8 min) features more fascinating image-mixing, as director Gina Haraszti creates split-screen effects to present simultaneously different shots of the same room. The action in these shots include a murder and a seduction, and both feature the same two actors; it’s ambiguous as to whether these actions represent different episodes of the same story or different stories altogether. The mix of sex and violence in WANING is nowhere near as creepy as the handmade puppets that appear in Joshua Dean Tuthill’s BLACK DOG (2017, 15 min). This short, which contains little discernible animation, proceeds mainly as a series of tableaux; Tuthill circles around themes of space exploration, corporal punishment, and taxidermy until a terrifying picture of childhood emerges. I don’t know what any of this has to do with anthropomorphized goats, but they certainly add strength to this particular batch of nightmare fuel. Closing out the program is Mike Olenick’s RED LUCK (2014, 26 min), which alludes to several possible plot lines without committing to any of them, much like Luis Buñuel’s surrealist classic L’AGE D’OR. Like VIOLETS, this hinges on an act of violence, but given the freewheeling nature of the filmmaking, the violence comes across as a non-sequitur. Cloverleafs are crucial motifs, appearing on clothing, in gardens, in the shape of a high-rise building; the consistent imagery helps to shape the wacky, dreamlike ideas into something resembling a linear narrative. Or maybe that consistency is simply a put-on, a joke on spectators’ expectation that movies progress from one point to another. BS
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Shorts Program Two
Kelly Sears’ work thrills me with its suggestive allusions and intimate paranoia. VOICE ON THE LINE (2019, 7 min) epitomizes these qualities as Sears collages together footage taken from late-1950s archival films to dramatize a short history of a dystopian surveillance program, led by an unspecified Central Agency that’s capitalizing on peoples’ willingness to overshare with comely-sounding exchange operators. In the strangely optimistic scenario, this bastardization of civil liberties lends itself to a new world order in which people are more open about their hopes, fears, and strangest desires. As always with Sears' work, this invokes dual feelings of complacency and disquiet, thus revealing how one is often lurking behind the other. Shayna Connelly’s ARTIST STATEMENT (2019, 5 min)—pun seemingly intended—is a play on that most affected of texts. Categorization is an issue with most filmmakers, and here Connelly explores the limitations of that practice, which are exacerbated by her being a female filmmaker; a male narrator, situated as if giving a third-party endorsement, ‘defines’ Connelly’s work, forcing us to contend with the uncomfortable realization that male voices are often needed to substantiate work made by women. LIMITED SPEECH HOLDS ENDLESS MISUNDERSTANDINGS (2014, 10 min), a satisfyingly cultivated film by Orr Menirom, features a tense 2010 interview between Noam Chomsky and an Israeli journalist, much of which subtly revolves around the nuances of language and speech rather than their apparent political disharmony. After what initially appears to be a straightforward rebroadcast of the interview, Menirom begins breaking it down and manipulating it to create an entirely new monologue that exists independent of the interviewer and interviewee but is nevertheless connected to them through language, in such a way that borrows from Chomsky’s linguistic theory. Menirom even reconstructs their setting—a bland hotel lounge—using video footage of shadows on paved surfaces, a clever aesthetic complement to the verbal conceit. Lori Felker’s THIS IS MY SHOW (2010, 14 min) follows a similar trajectory as it unravels an all-too familiar format, a television show where home-and-garden experts teach us their ways, all while employing the excessively serene tone characteristic of them. Felker convincingly appears as Adrienne Edmunds, whose monologue evolves from instruction to implication as she uses items and actions respective to landscaping as a metaphor for issues typically removed from the natural world. As she eloquently states while meandering through a field, “If you’re over 16, and anyone except your parent or legal guardian tells you that you’re undermining their authority, please do me a favor and slap them in the face for me.” Like Menirom’s film, some preconceived structure is being altered, creating a disassociation that invites new interpretation. Finally, Melika Bass’ WAKING THINGS (2012, 34 min) is a feast for the senses. Taking place in a primeval wood, a makeshift family unit prepares a meal for a group of outsiders—the visual and auditory splendor one experiences will eclipse a desire to make sense of its plot, so entrenched is it in a world unbeknownst to us but which we have this momentary pleasure of inhabiting. The foley, done by Bass and Matthew Paul Jinks, is simply extraordinary. Bass’ films are an evocation, a gentle demand on the senses to watch and listen as one hasn’t before, and this is especially inviting in that way. KS
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Shorts Program Three
Marianna Milhorat’s L’INTERNATIONALE (2010, 10 min), the opener of this shorts program, sets the tone for the subsequent two works in the way it conjures a vivid sense of place. This is especially impressive since Milhorat doesn’t reveal within L’INTERNATIONALE just where the film takes place. Her artist statement refers to “futuristic factories and boreholes harvesting geothermal steam [that] serve as beacons of familiarity in the face of an unknown future,” and that’s as good a way as any of describing the film’s content. There are also shots of geodesic domes, a woman carrying a rife, and expressway underpasses (Milhorat’s mobile takes through the latter are somewhat reminiscent of the scene on the Tokyo Expressway in Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS). What emerges is a piece of found science fiction that moves like free verse; the flow of images is oddly soothing despite the feelings of alienation those images engender. From an unknown future to bizarre history—the next short in the program, Laura Kraning’s black-and-white DEVIL’S GATE (2011, 20 min), meditates on strange true story of Jack Parsons, a disciple of infamous occultist Alistair Crowley who conducted pioneering experiments in the field of jet propulsion in the years after World War II. Kraning incorporates texts, written by Parsons, about rocket scientists engaging in occult rituals; this material enters the film gradually, after Kraning introduces us to the Pasadena outskirts (where Parsons and company worked) in 2009, when the area was ravaged by wildfires. The structure of DEVIL’S GATE suggests that the wildfires are burning a hole through the present so we can see into the past; however, Kraning leaves the past to our imaginations. The film unfolds mainly in landscape shots and printed text; there are never people onscreen, and this makes the work feel especially eerie. By contrast, the third and longest work here is warm and life-affirming. Matthieu Canaguier’s EAST OF HELL (2013, 45 min) is an affectionate documentary portrait of black metal bands in Surabaya, the capital city of East Java. Divided into profiles of three musicians, the movie details not only the music these men perform, but also the myriad ways that they earn a living. Canaguier suggests that they live humbly in more ways than one—yes, they make little money from their music, but more importantly they love metal culture in a way that borders on religious devotion. The most interesting scenes of EAST OF HELL show some of the subjects engaged in preshow rituals that incorporate Indonesian spiritual traditions; the men’s apparent solemnity in carrying out the rituals inflects how we view them as performers. Canaguier spices up the human-interest material with lively footage of Surabaya, effectively making the city a fourth major character. BS
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Usama Alshaibi's AMERICAN ARAB (US/Documentary)
About halfway through AMERICAN ARAB, Marwan Kamel, a local Chicago musician of Syrian and Polish descent, sums up the knotty problem of carving out an identity in a country not fond of ambiguity, and offers this solution: "Give people the space to be complicated." It's something of a thesis for director Usama Alshaibi's complex and extremely personal documentary. The core of the movie traces Alshaibi's life through family photos and home movies as he bounces from Iraq to Iowa to Chicago, occasionally doubling back. In AMERICAN ARAB he examines how this sense of impermanence, coupled with ongoing issues of Islamophobia in pre- and post-9/11 America, can wreak havoc on one's sense of self. Alshaibi wonders, "Why are Americans so clueless about Arabs?" before unleashing a cavalcade of archival idiocies from the campaign trail, cable news, and mindless Hollywood fare—thanks to Robert Zemeckis you can't yell "Libyans!" in a crowded room without a bunch of thirty-somethings hitting the deck. Later, he (or some other brave soul) tests the water at a 2002 "flag rally" to predictable results, although one rarely gets measured commentary from someone literally waving a flag. All this amounts to a nasty reminder that Islamophobia is an especially insidious strain of bigotry; it often masquerades as patriotism or harmless yucks, but takes a toll on those attempting to straddle a precarious national divide. The latter part of AMERICAN ARAB delves into more personal territory: Alshaibi experiences firsthand matters only previously discussed, and we meet his wife Kristie as they start a family—the couple bonded over a love of experimental film, WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING enthusiasts take heart. With Alshaibi at its center, AMERICAN ARAB never becomes overly didactic and ultimately succeeds because the filmmaker himself is eminently likable and self-aware. While struggling to find a place where he belongs he openly acknowledges, "We tend to romanticize the places we aren't at." By allowing himself and his subjects space to be complicated, Alshaibi manages to thoughtfully examine this hard to define American identity. (2013, 60 min) JS
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Dietmar Post and Lucia Palacios’ MONKS - THE TRANSATLANTIC FEEDBACK (Germany-Spain-US/Documentary)
If you are unfamiliar with the band The Monks, do yourself the immediate favor of acquiring their fantastic 1966 album "Black Monk Time." After the first few songs, you will have to remind yourself that the album was written a full decade before punk and no-wave by American expatriates living in Germany. Falling somewhere between a less polished version of The Beatles and an angrier variant of The Kinks, The Monks were the harbingers of the terse minimalist sounds to come from the underground in the following decades. This documentary, featuring band interviews, concert footage, and a wide variety of live, demo, and album tracks, details the formation of the group from an Army band covering popular beat tunes while stationed in West Germany to discharged conceptual quintet protesting the Vietnam War. Though the documentary is a bit by-the-numbers, a formula is a formula for a reason, and this one still manages to engage and inform despite the standardized narrative arc. The only real flaw in the doc comes from the lack of commentary from the band's managers, the duo largely responsible for the radical shift in style and substance that the band took. Regardless, their story is unique, and well worth hearing. (2006, 100 min) DM
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Jim Trainor's THE PINK EGG (US/Experimental Narrative)
Jim Trainor, a longtime animator and associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, once said, “If my films were live-action, I’d probably be jailed.” We'll see, because his first live-action feature, the whimsical, eerie comedy THE PINK EGG, is here. It's a delightful, virtually wordless “fact-based horror film” about the bizarre life cycles of insects. Humans in unitards portray bugs molting, growing, killing, devouring, and fornicating (or at least sharing vats of bug sperm). The film put me in mind of Karl Pilkington, who used to share his fanciful, anthropomorphized ideas about insect life on the old Ricky Gervais Show podcasts. As Karl tells it, there exists a parasitic wasp that looks for a certain type of spider, lands on its back and injects it with a maggot. The maggot lives off the spider, who thinks, oh, I've got something to take care of now, and makes a web for it. When the maggot gets to the web, it eats the spider. So, Karl wants to know, when did they all get together and work this arrangement out? Laughing, Ricky explains that whereas human behavior is characterized by thought and free will, behavior in lower life forms bypasses any form of consciousness. It's the kind of story you'll see in THE PINK EGG, with the dark humor arising from the blunt truths of evolution and natural selection. In a scene about the bug dating process, we're in a kind of weird insect nightclub. Female honeybees, we learn, may choose the gender of their offspring: watch them turn the blue eggs pink. The film is scrupulously researched (there's even a bibliography!), but playful. The colorful wooden sets and the digitally textured backdrops make my eye happy. The electronic keyboard music, by Caroline Nutley, is jaunty, haunting, and poignant. Chirping cicadas and crickets comprise a big part of the soundscape. Trainor seems to share a sense of existential horror (and ambivalent love) in the face of the natural world with Werner Herzog, who once famously characterized the vaunted "harmony" of nature as one of "overwhelming and collective murder." Yet for all the murder on display here, the film has a sense of childlike wonder and a homemade feel. (2016, 71 min) SP
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Adam Sekuler's TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS (US/Documentary)
This is perhaps one of the greatest films about death I’ve seen—it’s a triumph of empathy, a tour de force of emotion, and, perhaps even more monumentally, a prime example of cinema as ontological examination. The film follows Shar, a transgender person with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and her partner, Cynthia, as Shar endeavors to voluntarily stop eating and drinking (VSED) in order to leave this life on her own terms. Near the beginning of the film, as Shar and Cynthia review a contract verifying Shar’s decision to undertake this process, the person helping them with these documents points out that filming such a declaration can suffice as proof that it was pursued willingly. Thus Sekuler’s project becomes that proof, a document of resolve that exists as witness to Shar’s remaining life and eventual death. Although Sekuler is addressed in the film, his distance from the subjects is studied and respectful; it’s clear he’s become involved in their lives (as any filmmaker spending large amounts of time with their subjects is apt to do), but his camera is unobtrusive, neither gawking nor dispassionate. The framing and cinematography are particularly beautiful, infused with a glow that seems to emanate from those on screen. My favorite scenes are of Shar singing and of Shar and Cynthia sitting on a bench overlooking a beautiful view, discussing their relationship. One can feel the empathy behind the camera, the power of patient observation evident in each of these parts. Most striking, though, are the shots of Shar after she’s passed on, interspersed randomly in the film’s latter half. By cutting between scenes of Shar alive and dead, Sekuler reminds us not just of our own mortality, but of cinema’s ability to manifest both conditions. Even more impressive is the multitude of topics with which Sekuler is working, including considerations of Buddhist spirituality and gender identity, Shar’s personhood as brilliant and complex in anticipation of death as it was in the pinnacle of life. (2017, 93 min) KS
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Catalina Arroyave Restrepo’s DAYS OF THE WHALE (Colombia)
Available t0 rent through Facets here and the Gene Siskel Film Center here
The streets of Medellin, Colombia, have been rife with discord and violence for decades. Formerly run by Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel and now facing problems with ex-paramilitary Aguilas Negras, the city makes a charged backdrop for a film about power, art, and love. Simon and Cristina are two artists who are part of a larger artist collective that maintains a kind of communal home/community space. Their story is an old one of teenage love and bravado. Cristina comes from a middle-class family and lives in a condominium; Simon is from the slums of the city. But while Simon wants to fight society at any chance, Cristina is more hesitant—her mother was forced to flee the city due to death threats. So when Simon decides to go up against the local enforcer looking for protection money, a rift between the two begins. The plot of DAYS OF THE WHALE is loose. The film cares more about mood, atmosphere, and environment than telling a particular story. Arroyave Restrepo has made an urban youth film for Medellin not unlike LA HAINE (Parisian youth), KIDS (New York City youth), or CITY OF GOD (Rio de Janeiro youth). And like those films, there are definitely stakes at play in DAYS OF THE WHALE, and they are definitely high. But as opposed to the violence we see in LA HAINE and company, the protagonists here have art. They publish a ‘zine-like tract that not-so-indirectly calls out the thugs looking for protection money. The street gang responds with a painted death threat in front of the art collective’s building. Simon counters in the most directly disrespectful way he knows how: painting over their graffiti with his own. And with that begins an escalating battle of street art and violence. While never keeping a tight rein on the characters or the story, Arroyave Restrepo manages to keep the film from becoming meandering or messy. You very much feel the naïveté confused for bravado of Simon the coolness of film’s pacing. Nothing is rushed, because there don't seem to be any possible consequences. Until there are. DAYS OF THE WHALE is a solid drama with wonderfully dynamic, yet understated, acting. It understands that art is political and can be weaponized—that idea becomes literalized in the film’s narrative. As W.E.B. DuBois said, “All art is propaganda… and I do not give a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” (2020, 80 min) RJM
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Gero von Boehm’s HELMUT NEWTON: THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
There’s no one quite like Helmut Newton, for better or for worse. In the years since his tragic death in 2004, there have been few working photographers able to match his distinctive style—erotic, commanding, and heavily reliant on the female form. Through the use of archival footage and interviews with many of Newton’s subjects, Gero von Boehm’s documentary HELMUT NEWTON: THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL grapples with the complicated legacy of the controversial artist. Newton’s work earned him a reputation as a provocateur, keeping him in the spotlight and opening him up to plenty of criticism. Susan Sontag notably called Newton’s photographs misogynistic on live television—and after spending much of the film gazing at some of his more compromised female subjects, it’s hard to disagree. But the beauty of THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL is how it allows Newton’s subjects—and the women who worked with him behind the scenes—to speak for themselves. From Grace Jones to Anna Wintour to Isabella Rossellini, the narrative is a uniquely positive one, one in which his collaborators are given power and agency through Newton’s vision. The film is less concerned with exploring the psyche of Newton or his relationship to the male gaze in his work, but they make it clear that the media already did a lot of that work, though they focus largely on gossip and reductive bad-faith criticism than genuine criticism. There are also moments of his home life woven throughout the film, which helps to bring down the seemingly impenetrable curtain of celebrity. THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL is complicated, quite like Newton himself. It’s a worthy examination of how we interpret art in these times—like how an image can be degrading for some and empowering for others—and how that interpretation can change over time. (2019, 93 min) CC
Emily Harris’ CARMILLA (UK)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
It’s wonderful to see that the vampire film has finally made it through the dark tunnel that was TWILIGHT and its terrible cultural influence. Going nearly as far back to its literary roots as possible, this darkly beautiful film is an impressive adaptation of Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 Gothic novella of the same name. Predating Dracula by decades, though never achieving the cultural cache as that more popular work it directly influenced, the story of Carmilla is ripe for the screen. Isolated in the countryside and under the watch of a strict governess, a teenaged girl, Lara, becomes enchanted by a mysterious girl her own age who is brought into her home after being found in the wreckage of carriage accident. With no other survivors, and unable to recall her name, this strange girl has Lara choose her name: Carmilla. As the days go by, Lara and Carmilla become closer. Rumors of a mysterious disease afflicting young women in neighboring towns reach Lara’s household, but the governess is more concerned with what is obviously becoming a romantic attachment between young Lara and Carmilla. I’ll be giving away a few spoilers from this point, but given that the film is based on a 150-year-old story, I feel the statute of limitations on that has quite expired. Carmilla is the prototype for the lesbian vampire. What has now become a cliché and familiar trope traces its roots directly back to this story. But what makes this variation of the title character, and this adaptation of the story, particularly good is that it strips the malevolent antagonism of Carmilla from the original, along with the exploitative salaciousness of other countless adaptations. Director Emily Harris plays the connection between Carmilla and Lara far less like victim and prey and more as a young woman being seduced by her first love. There is a corrupted innocence to Lara’s character that she would give herself so fully to a stranger. Lara seems less a victim of a predatory supernatural being than that of a strict, repressive Victorian society. There is a wonderfully tender queer eroticism that plays throughout the film that adds tension to the perfectly-Gothic impending dread. There is a palpable inevitability to CARMILLA that is used masterfully to propel the story; the viewer may know the fates of both Carmilla and Lara, but that only adds to the increasing emotional weight. In addition to this expert handling of the story and plot, CARMILLA is also a truly beautiful film—both grotesque and darkly lavish. There seems to be a familiarity with the films of Jean Rollin, but stripped of that very French, very male, gaze. The women here are put on the screen to be attractive to each other, not necessarily to the audience—and certainly not specifically to men. It’s a period piece, of course, but made in a way that will still appeal to the modern aesthetics of the eternally moody, dark, teenager in us all. And one that definitely appeals to this queer who is still firmly in the second decade of their goth phase. If this was made when I was a teen, or in my early 20s, I can guarantee that I would have been utterly insufferable in making my friends watch it with me over and over (and over). And if you’re a spooky, witchy, gothy queer femme/woman, this is the absolutely perfect movie, made just for you. CARMILLA is a perfect dark, queer love story—candelabras and all; as seductively haunting a telling of this story now as it was 150 years ago. (2019, 96 min) RJM
Dawn Porter's JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here, Facets Cinémathèque here, or the Gene Siskel Film Center here
It seems fitting that JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE is being released when it is. As we grapple with the racism made plain by the police killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, this film provides context for the present moment in this country’s still unfinished work for civil rights and racial equity. And while the current White House occupant until recently could not be bothered to wear a mask to help quash a global pandemic, this documentary celebrates a man who fearlessly put his body on the line for a cause greater than himself. The highlights of Lewis’ life may be familiar from obituaries and tributes: the Nashville sit-in movement, the Freedom Rides, his leadership of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the March on Washington, the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation with state troopers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus bridge during the first Selma march. The filmmakers cover these points as well as other stories (like his childhood preaching to barnyard chickens) that Lewis himself acknowledges in the film he has told often before. Yet the filmmakers, working with Lewis, find ways to make these stories fresh, including visiting Lewis’ siblings and asking him to respond to previously unseen footage from the civil rights movement. The film covers his Congressional service, tracking one long day of constituent meetings and dropping in on a staff reunion; it also recounts the origin of the viral video of Lewis dancing in his office. Lewis does not always come off well in the film—we learn that his contentious 1986 primary election battle with former colleague Julian Bond fractured their friendship for years—and his decades-long marriage to his wife Lillian gets less attention than it should. Still, this documentary provides a well-rounded portrait of a courageous yet humble visionary who never stopped seeking justice or, in his words, making “good trouble” whether at the lunch counters of Nashville or the floor of the US House. Although Lewis himself is no longer with us, we are fortunate to still have JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE to tell his story and capture his spirit. (2020, 96 min) FT
Karen Maine’s YES, GOD, YES (US)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
YES, GOD, YES is the directorial debut of Karen Maine. Clocking in at a breezy 78 minutes, this expansion of her 2017 short film with the same title barely crosses the line for being feature length. Even so, this movie never feels either dragged out to reach that running time, nor falling too short to get it’s point across. A period piece set in 2001, YES, GOD, YES, lets us into the world of teenaged Alice, a good Catholic girl who is starting to get those all-too-familiar confusing thoughts about sex. Maine does a great job capturing the tail-end of the wild west era of the early internet. Alice is lured into the world of internet pornography by a random email and a message via AIM with those three letters and two words that defined an entire generation’s digital sexual awakening: “A/S/L,” and “Wanna cyber?” The film plays the angle of religion very strongly and leans into the very Catholic ideas of guilt and humiliation. While Alice is on her own, naively wondering about sex and masturbation and how she can reconcile it with being a morally good person, she has to endure rumors of her hooking up with a boy and doing something called “tossing his salad.” A large section of the film centers on a multi-day retreat, Kirkos, which is a barely veiled stand-in for the very real American Catholic high school retreat Kairos. As someone who went to Catholic school for a period of time and left just in time to avoid this strange, cultish outing, YES, GOD, YES does a surprisingly good job of taking the retreat down a couple pegs, while still respecting the concept. In fact, I could see people arguing that this film is, in fact, a Christian film. And a very good case could be made for it. That being said, it only preaches the good aspects of Christianity—forgiveness, understanding, and compassion. We get to follow Alice on her journey of self-discovery, both sexually and morally, and the film neither judges nor preaches to either her or the audience. While not as biting a critique on American Christian schooling as Brian Dannelly’s perfect 2004 film SAVED!, YES, GOD, YES, is the lovely little sister companion film. A perfect throwback to the teen films of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, YES, GOD, YES is a light, tight comedy that delicately teases out both teenage lust and religion; a definite welcome addition to the catalog of teen films. (2020, 78 min) RJM
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
American Writers Museum
Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco’s 2020 documentary FLANNERY (97 min) is available for rent locally via the AWM here.
Cinema Femme Short Film Festival
An online event organized locally that includes four shorts programs, panel discussions and Q&A sessions. Begins on Thursday and continues August 7-9. Complete info here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Praveen Morchhale’s 2018 Indian film WIDOW OF SILENCE (85 min) is also available for streaming beginning this week.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Sergio Navaretta’s 2019 film THE CUBAN (109 min), Ron Howard’s 2020 documentary REBUILDING PARADISE (95 min), Koji Fukada’s 2019 Japanese/French film A GIRL MISSING (111 min), and Yvan Attal’s 2019 French film MY DOG STUPID (99 min) are all available for streaming beginning this week. Check here for hold-over titles.
Music Box Theatre
Josh Kriegman, Eli B. Despres, and Elyse Steinberg’s 2020 documentary THE FIGHT (97 min) and Martha Kehoe and Joan Tosoni’s 2019 Canadian documentary GORDON LIGHTFOOT: IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND (91 min, Digital Projection) are available for streaming beginning this week. Check here for hold-over titles.
Chicago International Film Festival
Check here for titles currently available for rental.
Chicago Latino Film Festival
CLFF is offering a selection of features and shorts for rental. Information here.
ADDITIONAL ONLINE RECOMMENDATIONS
Joe Maggio’s THE LAST RITES OF JOE MAY (US)
Available to stream for free on Hoopla, Peacock, Tubi, and Amazon Prime Video (with a subscription)
Dennis Farina had one of the more unlikely routes to show business fame and fortune. He spent nearly 20 years with the Chicago Police Department, eventually knocking around the Chicago theater scene with the support of his fellow cops. Chicago actors were hot in the 1980s, and Farina was swept up in the talent scouting that took such stage actors as William Peterson, Joan Allen, Laurie Metcalf, Gary Cole, John Malkovich, and Gary Sinise on to bigger and better things. He was a regular in films by director Michael Mann, and unsurprisingly, he played a lot of cops and crooks. What I always appreciated about Farina’s approach to his characters was that he never overplayed their toughness. His real-life experience prevented him from hyping the potential threat his characters posed, allowing his natural gravity from having walked in those shoes do the talking for him. At the same time, he found something individual in each of them and understood the delusions and vulnerabilities that might drive a man to choose a tough-guy profession. I became startlingly aware of just how great an actor he had become after watching one of his last films, THE LAST RITES OF JOE MAY. The film looks at a few weeks in the life of its title character (Farina), an aged hustler of stolen goods who has just been released from the hospital after six weeks’ treatment for pneumonia. He must have been admitted in warmer weather, because the thin leather coat he wears is no match for the brutal dead of winter that greets him. When he arrives at his apartment in Chicago’s Little Italy neighborhood, he sees that his belongings are missing and that a child may be around. The landlord (Phil Ridarelli), thinking Joe died, rented the apartment to Jenny Rapp (Jamie Anne Allman) and her daughter Angelina (Meredith Droeger), and tossed all his belongings. Now homeless—even his ancient car has been ticketed as abandoned and towed away—Joe has nowhere to go and nothing to do but ride a bus until he is kicked off. One night, Jenny finds him shivering at her bus stop. She takes pity on him and offers him a room in the apartment. He immediately prepares to resume his “career” and get his life back on track. Farina plays May as a man who has followed his delusions all his life, believing he was destined to do something great and ruining his relationships with his family and friends in the process. His old age is a betrayal of how he sees himself. He rejects the advice of his friend Billy (Chelcie Ross) to move into a retirement community with him where he can socialize and relax. Joe’s life project is unfinished, so relaxation is out of the question. The less Farina does, the more he says about May—his quiet determination and a mind racing to outpace the bad fortune that is overtaking him, but not knowing what to do. Farina refuses easy sympathy with May, but he slowly allows Joe to reckon with himself. His saving grace is the tenuous friendship he forms with Jenny and Angelina, and it is through them that he lives up to his potential—which, surprisingly for him, is to do something for somebody else. Maggio’s script is observant and attuned to what happens to us when we find the world has passed us by before we are ready to go. Maggio’s camera, lensed by Jay Silver, offers the real Chicago, far from its famous landmarks, focusing instead on outside-the-Loop streets, working-class neighborhoods, and meat-packing facilities. I’d almost say this film isn’t recognizably anywhere to people who don’t live here, but the presence of Farina and a raft of other Chicago actors gives it a distinctive voice and vibe. THE LAST RITES OF JOE MAY is full of small, telling moments that paint a picture of a place, a time, and especially a man whose life amounted to something after all just in the telling of it. The film builds believably to its inevitable end, honestly earning Joe the respect he craved all of his life. Dennis Farina’s tour-de-force performance is an appropriate legacy for a great actor. (2011, 107 min) MF
Luis Buñuel’s THE YOUNG ONE (US/Mexico)
Available to stream for free on Dailymotion
THE YOUNG ONE would be a startlingly perceptive, and truthfully satiric, treatment of American racism if it were made today. It’s even more so when you consider it was released in 1960. To learn further that it was directed by Luis Buñuel was, for me, to discover a new side to one of my favorite directors. The film is absent of the surrealism or dream logic I associate with the Spanish revolutionary, yet it’s got plenty of Buñuel signatures: illicit lust, a darkly comic eye for irony, the lingering over shoes and feet—and, in a word, the overall sureness of his directorial mastery. It’s probably fair to say this movie is still relatively forgotten, even though critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, notably, championed it back in 1993 for its Chicago revival, calling it an “unsung masterpiece.” Buñuel made the picture when he was about 60, at the tail end of his period of exile in Hollywood and Mexico, and some three decades after the surrealist outrages he perpetrated on Lost Generation Paris (UN CHIEN ANDALOU and L’AGE D’OR). Co-writing with the blacklisted Hugo Butler, he adapted a 1957 short story by Peter Matthiessen, "Travelin' Man.” The tale is potentially pulpy, even offensive. Bernie Hamilton plays Traver, a Black jazz clarinetist falsely accused of raping a white woman. Fleeing a lynch mob, he escapes to an island off the South Carolina coast (the film was actually shot in Mexico). It’s a game preserve presided over by the cruel warden Miller, played to a T by Zachary Scott (Renoir’s THE SOUTHERNER). The fugitive encounters Evvie (Key Meersman), a wild child, the pubescent granddaughter of Miller’s recently deceased partner. Perhaps inspired by Nabokov’s Lolita, Evvie is an innocent whom Miller views increasingly lecherously. She becomes a kind of “angel of mercy” to Traver, whom the racist Miller initially attempts to murder. What follows is a fascinating series of shifts in the power dynamics between the two men. Miller uses the racial slur you’d expect to refer to Traver, who fires back by calling Miler “white trash.” Both men are veterans; when they trade war stories, Miller tells of a buddy who died in combat—but then notes with a sardonic edge that, of course, his friend was merely a “poor white.” One day Jackson (Crahan Denton), the virulently racist boatman from the mainland, arrives. He brings along Rev. Fleetwood (Claudio Brook), an honest preacher who’s to be Evvie’s appointed guardian. Jackson reveals that a Black clarinetist is wanted for rape back in town. (Rosenbaum points out the symmetrical balance between this false charge against Traver, and the preacher’s dawning realization that Miller really did rape Evvie the night before.) Though the character of Rev. Fleetwood tickles him, Buñuel shows the preacher as a civilized man who believes in law, in contrast to the predatory vigilantism of Miller and Jackson. Buñuel’s critique, if jaundiced, is strangely humanistic. Miller and Jackson are not simply evil, but acting as they have been taught by their Southern society. As ugly, hard and mean as Miller is, he has a tender side: he likes to sing “Red Rosey Bush” and strum his guitar next to the fire. When Jackson tells an anecdote about beating a black man, a story he finds hilarious, Buñuel films him from a certain angle, and lights him in a certain way—it’s quite subtle, but it’s enough so that we see racism as a form of madness, a sickness distorting these poor whites. When Evvie asks Traver why he and Miller can’t just be friends, Traver explains, “It’s easy for him to kill me, and it’s hard for me to kill him. So he’s still got the power.” At such moments, the film is blazingly modern in subject. I could only think of George Floyd—how easy, even casual, it was for his murderer to kill him. The beautiful black and white photography is by the great Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. The soundscape is alive, evocative of a diverse island ecosystem that’s red in tooth and claw. Buñuel views it all with a kind of bemused fascination, as an alien pondering the strangeness of Earthling foibles might. For me, THE YOUNG ONE was a revelation: a “new” contender for one of Buñuel best films. Perhaps it took an outsider to see America so clearly. (1960, 95 min) SP
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 through the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Music Box Theatre, and Facets; and Facets 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 until further notice. Below is the most recent information we have, which we will update as new information becomes available.
Note that venues/series marked with an asterisk (*) are currently presenting or plan to do regular or occasional “virtual” online screenings.
OPEN:
Music Box Theatre – The Music Box reopens on July 3, presenting physical, in-theater screenings and also continues to present online-only screenings*
CLOSED/POSTPONED/HIATUS:
Asian Pop-Up Cinema – See above for online offering; otherwise, spring series postponed till the fall*
Beverly Arts Center – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Events cancelled/postponed until furtuer notice*
Chicago Film Archives – The CFA’s annual “Media Mixer” event, previously scheduled for May, has been rescheduled for September 16
Chicago Film Society – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Chicago Filmmakers – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice*
Comfort Film (at Comfort Station) – Programming cancelled with no set start date
Conversations at the Edge (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Screenings cancelled until further notice
Facets Cinémathèque – Closed until further notice (see above for “virtual” online screenings)
Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
filmfront – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Gallery 400*
Gene Siskel Film Center – Closed until further notice (see above for “virtual” online screenings)
The Nightingale – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
The Park Ridge Classic Film Series (at the Park Ridge Public Library) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Festivals:
The Cinepocalypse film festival (June) – 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: July 31 - August 6, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Cody Corrall, Marilyn Ferdinand, Raphael Jose Martinez, Doug McLaren, Liam Neff, Scott Pfeiffer, James Stroble, Fred Tsao