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
George Romero x 3
Music Box Theatre — Check Venue website for showtimes
George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (US Revival)
George Romero would go on to make better films than NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD—movies that suggest the unlikely fusion of Mark Twain’s all-American satire, Michael Powell’s fanciful curiosity, and John Cassavetes’ intimate, handmade aesthetic within the confines of the horror genre. But his debut is still an object lesson in independent filmmaking: Rather than cover up his distance from Hollywood (budgetary and geographical), Romero embraces it. The resulting film boasts a sharp sense of location—the suburbs and rural areas outlying Pittsburgh—and an understanding that the banal makes the horror all the more scary when it arrives. Much has been written about the radical implications of casting a black actor to play the heroic, gun-toting lead in 1968, though Romero (one of the few popular U.S. filmmakers so consistently open about his radical politics) claims to have no political motivation in this decision. More focused is the film’s pointed anger at middle-class conformity, which gives the film its enduring bitter rage. (1968, 96 min, DCP Digital) BS
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George Romero's DAY OF THE DEAD (US Revival)
George Romero’s original Trilogy of the Dead concluded in 1985 with DAY OF THE DEAD, perhaps the most divisive entry in the series, and certainly the most despair-inducing. A grim pressure-cooker taking place almost entirely in an underground research and storage facility, the film’s subterranean setting befits its excavation of deep, reptilian aspects of the human psyche. At the opening of the film, Romero’s characters have already reached a breaking point: cut off from all communication with the outside world, a team of scientists are wearing out the patience of the numbskull military detail tasked with facilitating their wayward experiments into zombie physiology and behavior. Seemingly keeping a cool head amidst the carnage is Dr. Sarah Bowman (Lori Cardille), the film’s rational center, but her status as the group’s only woman makes her the subject of harassment and derision from the grunts, who instead defer only to the eccentric and condescending chief scientist Dr. Logan. (The film’s surgical skewering of male egos, scientists and soldiers alike, prompted critic Robin Wood to call DAY OF THE DEAD “one of the great feminist movies.”) There’s plenty of righteous gore from the hand of effects maestro Tom Savini, particularly once things boil over in the third act, but Romero pointedly dedicates substantial screen time to Logan’s research, which aims to establish behavioral control over the dead by domesticating one exceptionally smart zombie, “Bub.” (An unforgettable creation, Bub is dynamically performed by Sherman Howard, who gradually imbues the creature's somnambulant shuffle with a gunslinging Western swagger). The clinical focus is no accident: DAY OF THE DEAD confirms that, for all that Romero’s zombie films have been celebrated as allegories (of capitalism, racial and gender politics, dunderheaded American militarism, etc.), his interest is essentially sociological, stemming first and foremost from what the genre reveals about the fundamentals and the extremes of human behavior. Deprived of the grand scale he initially conceived—once his budget was cut in half, Romero mercilessly pared his original script from 200 to 88 pages—DAY OF THE DEAD instead trades in broad cultural types (paging Dr. Frankenstein) and more modest undead hordes, but that’s all to the film’s enduring strength, as a near-universal parable of warring impulses towards wanton brutality and the pretense of civility. It also shows Romero’s underrated abilities as a dramatist: without the money to build a world, the director proves himself an expert tension-builder instead. The suspense is especially remarkable since, as with all of the DEAD films, we know better than to expect a happy ending. (1985, 100 min, Digital Projection) MM
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George Romero’s LAND OF THE DEAD (US Revival)
With the fourth installment of his Dead series, and the first in 20 years, George Romero decided to go straight for the jugular of American society. If the prior films were allegories about race, consumerism, and Cold War militarism, this is an outright declaration of intent. LAND OF THE DEAD continues in the world created by 1968’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, where the dead are returning to life with the sole purpose of eating the living. Here in LAND, we see a city that has adapted to this new reality. Borders have been built, there are trained gunman, people have found roles to fill within this society’s new normal. Unfortunately, this society has become even more overtly stratified than the one before it. The utopian possibility of humanity coming together to fight the universal threat of the undead has disintegrated into a world of cold Ayn Randian survival of the fittest. Where you would expect to see an egalitarian leveling of social status you instead find a gulf between those who had money before the zombie outbreak, or who profiteered from it, and those who are still forced to work for them. The film spreads itself throughout three main locations: Fiddler’s Green—the enclosed Trump Tower-esque complex where the elite live as if nothing has changed; the Golden Triangle area of downtown Pittsburgh—a general shantytown type are where the average people who are forced to struggle and scour to live; and then the outer limits—the apocalyptic landscape littered with the undead. Like all good Romero films, LAND focuses itself on its characters. While the ones here aren’t as well fleshed out as in the previous three DEAD films, we still get a great sense of the world the film lives in through them. That has always been Romero’s greatest strength, world building through characters. Our main four characters give us everything we need to know about how Romero views America at the time. We have the plucky street fighter who just wants a just world, the grifter who is content being a hired gun when it serves him, the greedy, elitist millionaire who is just as monstrous as the zombies, and a zombie who has retained enough mental acumen to organize the undead. Up until this point Romero’s films had always been on limited budgets, leaving him to create a monstrous universe of panic through only his script, his actors, and his limited sets. With LAND, we finally see what Romero can do with the budget to have more than a single location and some higher-end special effects. Unfortunately, the film seems to meander a little bit with all this new freedom. The plot is good, and the commentary wonderfully biting, but Romero is trying to cover a lot ground and make up for the 20 years without an installment in the franchise. That said, it’s still a good film, and far better than some of the following ones in the franchise. Whatever minor flaws the film has in comparison to the previous three are not its fault—by 2005 even Romero was competing with himself in the zombie genre: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, DAWN OF THE DEAD, and DAY OF THE DEAD still stand as three of the best films in that sub-genre, and arguably in all of horror. LAND, however, is a perfect entry to show what he really wanted to say to America when he finally got the loudest microphone possible. Until LAND he was relegated to a cult hero director of the creepy aisle of the video store; by the time this film came out reams of academic papers had been written on his works and his entire output re-evaluated. But the film itself is a gory good time and will remind you that George Romero is the George Carlin of horror films—history has proven him absolutely right about everything. (2005, 97 min, DCP Digital) RJM
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All of the Romero films are preceded by a 10-minute prerecorded introduction by Daniel Kraus, co-author of The Living Dead, a Romero novel left unfinished at his death.
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More info (including COVID policies) at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Kris Rey’s I USED TO GO HERE (New US)
Music Box Theatre — Check Venue website for showtimes; also available for streaming 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.
Also screening at the Music Box this week: Dave Franco’s 2020 film THE RENTAL (89 min, DCP Digital) and Christian Nilsson’s 2020 short UNSUBSCRIBE (30 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 duration 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 Four
Forget JOKER—you only have to look to underground cinema to find the medium’s true outsiders, likewise aggravated and mirthful, and simply relishing in perversion. This trio of shorts exemplifies the notion; alienation here is disturbed, humorous, and, finally, beautiful. In Dietmar Post (who co-directed MONKS: THE TRANSATLANTIC FEEDBACK, featured in last week’s list), Lawrence Gise, Leslie Hucko, David White, Matt Bezanis, and Hsia-Huey Wu’s BOWL OF OATMEAL (1996, 10 min)—made collaboratively during an eleven-week film course at New York University’s School of Continuing Education—the title dish begins speaking to its consumer, a lonely, middle-aged man with no propensity for going out and meeting people. “I don’t know, man,” he tells his oatmeal, which is encouraging the man to put himself out there. “I’m just not into it.” Rather than find companionship, the man becomes resolved to make it; the second half, when this revelation comes to fruition, is like a horror movie, less because of its discomfiting imagery and more for the feeling of discomfiture it evokes, a mark of success among films of this kind. The grainy, jittery 16mm aesthetic services the provocation. Martin Scorsese’s TAXI DRIVER (1976) is, of course, the mold from which this die has been cast, so it’s ironic that the second film in the program, Bryan Boyce’s WALT DISNEY’S TAXI DRIVER (2012, 5 min), described as being a “fair use parody,” combines Scorsese’s outré classic with no less than the effulgent output of Walt Disney himself. It’s not so much a mash-up as a self-described ‘reimagineering’; here, the grittiness of 70s New York is replaced by iconic characters and symbols from the Disney universe. That the effect isn’t so disparate from that of the original speaks to the inherently frivolous and even pornographic nature of Disney properties, which just trade in ribald jubilance rather than vice. Speaking of which, both those things find a happy marriage in Scott Cummings’ BUFFALO JUGGALOS (2014, 30 min), an ecstatic and richly aesthetic portrait of Juggalos (devotees of the band Insane Clown Posse, for those unfamiliar with this fascinating milieu) in Buffalo, New York. Comprised of 30 one-minute vignettes—some based in reality, some conjured for the film—it’s not a documentary; Cummings collaborated with the juggalos to create an unsteady tableau that neither reinforces nor belies Juggalo lore. “My hope is that through the film the myth of the Juggalo deepens and they become more mysterious, more other and more confrontational,” Cummings wrote in Filmmaker Magazine. “That when you are confronted by the film you are confronting that face in war paint. That you actually live the Dark Carnival for thirty minutes and come out not knowing what you’ve just seen.” This speaks not just to his short, but to this wondrously galling program overall. KS
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Shorts Program Five
Blunt eroticism, playful perversions, and clinical sexuality is celebrated and analyzed in Shorts Program Five. Nazlı Dinçel's HER SILENT SEAMING (2014) uses roughed-up, partially destroyed images from one of earlier films intercut with scratched-in text of sexual memories and interactions. Emulsion and emotions are similarly frayed in this film, while celluloid damage creates a rhythmic beat and moments of fleshy performative levity control the frame in the final half. This film was a step forward in Dinçel's work and admirers of her recent films will enjoy seeing the beginnings of some of her methods and themes. Speaking of fleshy levity, Darrin Martin's THE CASTS (2013) is a mysterious delight. Bearded shirtless men appear in bubbles on the screen, next to them (but unseen by the hunks) are revealed molded casts of odd shapes and textures. The men are feeling the unseen objects and describing them. Some use poetic and metaphorical terms and some are very straightforward. It's that simple. And it's a helluva lot of fun. Like most pleasures, it's hard to explain the appeal, but then again an explanation would maybe be pointless. Just enjoy the show. Malia Bruker's V/IRL (2018) is a playful, reality-twisting portrait of artist Lena NW. The artist and the filmmaker make a fantastic and clear-eyed planting-of-the-flag collaborative artist statement from "a self-proclaimed feminist nihilist" and her views on internet-influenced art and upbringing and the problematic spaces she is rollickingly reclaiming. Angelo Madsen Minax's THE EDDIES (2019) rhymes the inexorable flows of water and human sexuality. Documentary footage shows the attempts to control the flow of water below the streets of Memphis, TN, while semi-documentary footage shows a semi-fictionalized account of the filmmaker testing the waters with a Craigslist hook-up post with a few guys named Eddie (RIP to the Personals section). An "eddy" in the river is spot where an obstruction reverses the flow and creates a usually-gentle but sometimes violent disruption, and the human Eddies in this film have a similar potential for menace, but thankfully the filmmaker's trip ends with a pleasant resolution. SPEECHLESS (2008) is a continuation of filmmaker Scott Stark's exploration of stroboscopic effects, creating depth and motion out of still images by rapidly twisting and turning photographic slides. This time the source material is a set of "ViewMaster 3D reels that accompanied a textbook entitled The Clitoris." He rhymes the inherently powerful images with similarly flickering still pictures of branches and leaves and architectural grids. I'm unsure if the intention is provocation or something else, but the film undeniably works as a pure delirious experience. Also screening is the funny colorful sketchy short, Naya, TheOutdoorCat's PIEDAD (2019). JBM
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Shorts Program Six
The films in CUFF’s sixth “Best Of” program are united by images of water and by the integration of formalist concerns with conventional documentary subjects. While not the longest film in the program, Ben Russell’s RIVER RITES (2011, 11 min) is certainly the most formidable; in retrospect, it’s fair to say that this exercise in ecstatic ethnography marked a major diversion in the course of both anthropological and experimental filmmaking for the decade to come. A single take filmed in super-16mm at a riverbank in Suriname, RIVER RITES records a quotidian but joyful scene of group bathing and washing among members of the Saramaccan community; were it not for two simple creative interventions, the film would simply reproduce the antiquated “whole bodies, whole events” standards of ethnographic observation. Russell’s inspired treatment doesn’t just throw objectivity out the window, it brings his own deep aesthetic traditions (Providence, RI noise music, artist's film, psychedelic experience) to bear on the material, crafting a richly layered cultural encounter from a few simple elements. The decontextualized, disinhibited attitude towards filming the Saramaccan tribal communities has aged about as well as Arthur magazine and Animal Collective, but it’s easy to see why the boundary-crossing spirit of this film has guided Russell’s work ever since—and why it has created something of an enduring template for others. To experimental cinema, RIVER RITES brought the academic luster of “field research,” a move whose consequences can traced across at least a half-decade’s worth of avant-garde sidebars at the world’s foremost film festivals; to ethnographic film, it brought a renewed engagement with the visceral possibilities of form that found its ultimate expression in “sensory ethnographies” like Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Parevel’s LEVIATHAN (2012). In this program, we see that tendency represented in Isabelle Carbonell’s THE BLESSED ASSURANCE (2019, 22 min), a documentary about jellyfish trawling off the Georgia Coast that recreates certain images from Leviathan almost verbatim. In experimental film, such derivativeness is hard to overlook; in the academic sphere, however, it’s just what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science,” a form of problem-solving that employs established paradigms to fill in gaps of knowledge and solve minor problems. More inventive is Hope Tucker's THE SEA [IS STILL] AROUND US (2012, 4 min), a visually minimalist yet historically dense account of environmental despoliation in and around the former mill town of Corinna, Maine. Tucker nimbly contrasts present-day landscapes with vintage postcards and texts drawn from various archival sources to narrate the transformation of Lake Sebasticook from idyllic vacation spot to “pool of shame.” As befits a work informed by the history of U.S. ecological thought, Tucker’s film is supremely intentional, resourceful, and concise. Lynne Siefert’s ARK (2016, 32 min) is also an impressive exercise in intention: filmed aboard a cruise ship, ARK casts a rigorously dispassionate eye upon the glittering surfaces and vapid entertainments of the leisure industry. Interspersed with voice-overs offering private confessions and boilerplate corporate-speak, the film has the trappings of an essay film, but feels more like a series of tableaux, capturing the depersonalizing architecture of a floating city that offers no space for escape from the imperative to pleasure. Siefert’s camera seeks out the seams and interstices of this immaculate vessel, but the total environment offers no room for subversion, only melancholy detachment. (One imagines that, with a different soundtrack, certain passages might work as well as promotional videos as they do here as critique.) Shown with RIVER RITES, it’s a reminder that no culture is as unfathomably opaque, or as inhospitable to the ecstasy of transgression, as our own. MM
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Shorts Program Seven
As you watch the shorts in this program, you’re likely to experience a range of feelings that unexpectedly morph and collide: curiosity entwined with anxiety, bemusement that vacillates with odd clarity, laughter simmering in agonizing suspense. Although they are varied in style, these shorts are unified by a productive tension that emerges between deadpan form and often cockeyed or uneasy subject matter. This dialectic is shrewdly exploited by Kelly Sears’ ONCE IT STARTED IT COULD NOT END OTHERWISE (7 min), which recounts an inexplicable, seemingly supernatural event that terrorized an undisclosed high school in 1974. Told via eerily animated yearbook photos and pulsating, Ben Day-dotted school hallways—punctuated by a series of droll intertitles—it turns the ghostly “past-ness” inherent in all photographs into a cheeky invitation to contemplate the often unknowable stories lurking behind historical images. Depicting something even more enigmatic is Jenna Caravello’s FRONTIER WISDOM (5 min), a quick shot of hallucinatory animation that sees a telephone repairwoman possibly precipitating the rapture when she finds a theology-spouting corpse in the desert. When Annelise Ogaard’s GIRL POWDER (5 min) begins, you might think a commercial has interrupted the weirdness: rest assured, this is by design. Ogaard’s terse, funny-unsettling film, which centers on the ruthless millennial CEO of a corporatized drug cartel, uses its slick form to send up the deceptive seductiveness of advertising, all while tartly poking at industry sexism and capitalist ambition. Simon Queheillard’s MASTER-WIND (22 min) is something quite a bit looser. In it, an unidentified man stacks a series of objects on a grassy area beside a roadway, and steps aside to see how his contraptions react to the wind gusts from passing semi-trucks. Although a tad long, it’s amusing stuff, and Queheillard milks an impressive level of suspense from our expectancy of how his objects will behave, with nothing but physics and chance on their side. The final two shorts play into notions of masculine insecurity and ennui. In Brandon Daley’s SAVASANA (9 min), a hapless middle-aged man faces a crisis of manhood after a disturbing sexual encounter at his yoga class, while his authority is thrown into question when he’s unable to scold his son for using a bong. Humorous phallic imagery abounds. The crises in Spencer Parsons’ CHAINSAW FOUND JESUS (21 min) are both more diffuse and intergenerational, as two pairs of fathers and sons variously grapple with music technology, cocaine, religion, sex, and an angry pooch. The film’s florid, audiobook-like narration is an arch counterpoint to the shaggy dog story. JL
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Stephen Graves’ A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS (US/Experimental Documentary)
Let me say from the outset that I have never seen a film like this before; congratulations to the director for that. I’m not entirely sure if I liked it, but I was transfixed the entire time: moments of true, pure disgust lead into minutes of transfixing, meditative philosophizing. I never could get my bearing while watching this—and I’m fairly certain that was very intentional. Stephen Graves’ A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS, about his parents, Bill and Alice, is a not quite documentary and not quite creative fiction memoir. Graves filmed his family for a year and half—his father Bill is the center of the film; he has no colon and is a narcoleptic. We often see him naked, waking up, smeared in his own feces as his colostomy bag has detached in his sleep. We watch him painful reattach it. We hear, with near ASMR-level clarity, the sounds of his body. It’s absolutely disgusting—but only because the human body is disgusting. As physically revolting as the film makes this—and it goes well out of its way to do so—it only goes to prove the point that Bill is trapped in the repugnant prison that his body. He may be used to it as a reality, but it’s no less painful or gross to him as it is to us watching him. Graves allows a sense of empathy nearly to the point of pity for his father. His wife, Alice, on the other hand, is trapped in her own prison—Bill. As difficult as it is to watch at points, A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS truly shows what a family goes through when a member is diagnosed with a life altering disease. While Bill and Alice are on camera discussing the realities, it’s their son behind it filming—creating the document about this experience. Thinking of that made some scenes even more uncomfortable viewing. Graves taking a removed, journalistic viewpoint while his father struggled with feces covered open wounds almost made me mad at points. But from a filmmaking perspective I completely agreed with it. There is also a scene where Graves films his parents naked and sexual in bed together. Its inclusion is so lovely and poignant; even though Bill hates his body, and Alice has some resentment about his body, they still love each other. They are still attracted to each other, emotionally and sexually. It’s a powerful moment in the film, as Bill discusses how disgusting he felt after his colectomy, and how he didn’t feel like he could have sex for years. Once again, a great scene, but also slightly uncomfortable as viewer thinking of a son filming his parents in that manner. Throughout all of this documentary-style footage there are discursive ponderings and discussions of elements of the past that may or may not be real. In fact, maybe none of what is discussed is real. Perhaps only what we see on the screen in front of us is real. Reality is simply that Bill has no colon. The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari coined the phrase “body without organs” to describe the end product of social alienation in modern society. It’s the place where all desires move and exist in chaos. Perhaps Graves wants us to see his father, a literal body without organs, as a metaphor for Deleuze’s concept. Or perhaps poke fun at it. The title of the film can’t be a coincidence. But it also might not be important at all. Another confusion tossed our way. To be frank, I still don’t know what I think of this film. But I have been thinking about it constantly since viewing it. I’m not sure if I’m ready to see it again anytime soon, but I definitely want to watch it again at some point. As I said at the beginning of this review, I have never seen anything like this before. And I’m more than content with that being the meat of what I have to say about A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS. (2012, 82 min) RJM
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Jon Moritsugu’s PIG DEATH MACHINE (US)
Legendary American underground filmmaker Jon Moritsugu does his lo-fi/no-fi, down’n’dirty punk tinged thing again with PIG DEATH MACHINE. Filmed in blown out low-res/high-pixel digital that seems less 2013 and more 1998, Moritsugu takes us on a disgusting dumpstered adventure through the mind-altering world of rotten meat. In a thoroughly camp-damaged take on both The Monkey’s Paw and Flowers for Algernon, this film shows us the unintended consequences of bad pork. This is a warning to everyone about what happens when you finally get a sweet lick of that brass ring when you weren’t ready for it at all. The two protagonists are an airhead bimbo babe, who is served the tainted meat at a restaurant and quickly becomes one of the smartest people on Earth as a result, and a punk rock dishwasher working at the restaurant who eats a bit of a customer’s leftovers and finds that she can now hear plants talking to her. If this sounds like it’s insane and makes no sense then you’re following right along. It doesn’t. It’s not supposed to and it doesn’t matter. At all. A weirdo premise played out in the most delightfully weird ways. In and out in 82 minutes, this is a perfect cult film for those who don’t mind a few mind-altering substances themselves when they go out to see some mondo trasho. PIG DEATH MACHINES is a tribute to all those folks out there that have tried to smoke banana peels or catnip, or have huffed can on can of duster looking for that cheapo trasho high. Hipper than hip, cooler than cool, more fucked than fucked. Watch this and you’ll be dumber for it. And thanking me later. (2013, 82 min) RJM
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James N. Kienitz Wilkins' COMMON CARRIER (US/Experimental)
In all but the most technically virtuosic experimental films, double exposures suggest a haphazard brilliance, a grasping, instinctual sense of how two disparate images might interact in-camera. Even more sophisticated films which fuse separate rolls of footage through optical and contact printing are always walking a tightrope between chance and intention. Such superimpositions are firmly in the realm of collage: in the language of Cubism, it’s a synthetic form of connecting images together. But video superimpositions behave differently. If Godard’s later work is any guide, layering video images in editing software produces a more analytic form, as if the idea were to get the viewer to critically disentangle the overlaid images again. An experimental feature built entirely through superimposed frames, James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ COMMON CARRIER is also an analytic exercise, both a self-examination and a social inquiry into the lives of working artists during a time of precarity, corporate exploitation, debt, and dispersal. Wilkins downplays the more metaphorical possibilities of superimposition to focus on strategies for collapsing and expanding space, but when the film does shift into more pyrotechnic passages of associative montage, it’s easily the equal of Isiah Medina’s groundbreaking work of digital-cinema poetry 88:88 (2015). Wilkins’s more distanced, disciplined sensibility results in a less rapturous but more coherent and intriguing experiment. Controlled doublings and juxtapositions, such as the soundtrack that ping-pongs between NPR to Hot 93, lend the film an architecture that rein in the limitless possibilities of non-linear editing. In form and content, the film is a bit like looking at yourself in the window of a coffee shop: it’s easy to see oneself reflected among the film’s ensemble of frustrated creatives, moonlighters, and layabouts, but are you one of the people shamelessly broadcasting their professional ambitions, or are you another victim of wifi-enabled distraction? Superimposition represents only one of many shrewd ways the film dramatizes its identification-alienation, working-hard-or-hardly-working dilemmas: on the outside looking in as an off-screen voice, Wilkins also appears onscreen in interviews and its charmingly under-rehearsed scripted passages. While documentary and essay-film techniques embody the film’s split sense of immersion and distraction, its reflexivity is tempered by mumblecore-ish narrative passages about young people struggling with interpersonal, economic, geographical, and technological disconnection. In these moments, the film recalls two recent Argentinean films, Mathias Piñero’s HERMIA & HELENA (2016), which also made gorgeous use of superimpositions in the form of long dissolves, and Eduardo Williams’ THE HUMAN SURGE (2017), which also mapped its socioeconomic terrain around its characters’ relative access to data. But from its wily use of subtitles to the way it stages dialectical exchanges between Rihanna and Radiolab, COMMON CARRIER is an essay film through-and-through, one that earnestly grapples with the paradoxes of a creative economy in which people striving to imagine new forms of social connection find themselves increasingly alienated both from their labor and from their peers. It’s a keen work of analysis about the frustrated desire for synthesis. (2017, 78 min) MM
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Adam Sekuler's 36 HOURS (US/Documentary)
Considering that Adam Sekuler’s 2017 documentary TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS, one of my favorite films in recent years, so expertly broaches the topic of death, it’s no surprise that his follow-up documentary feature, 36 HOURS, takes a similarly notable approach to the subject of birth, specifically as it’s happening in real time to one woman. Said woman, Angelle, arrives at the hospital, literally bursting with life. In her head—and in a folder—is a birth plan, the trajectory of which she hopes her birth will follow but, as with anything relating to the body, is not guaranteed. Where TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS found Sekuler becoming almost a part of his subjects’ uncommon family, in 36 HOURS he takes a more pointedly observational approach, allowing for the physical realities of childbearing and then childbirth—which, for Angelle, ends up taking 36 hours altogether—to be unmarred by precarious subjectivity. Interspersed throughout is footage of Angelle, a contemporary dancer and choreographer, nude and immensely pregnant, dancing in the woods. Perhaps in spite of itself, the film strays from the potential for wooiness that’s inherent to many of its subjects; Sekuler is exceptionally respectful, heaping neither undue attention nor scrutiny on the very kind of person—one who is pregnant, and one who has made specific choices both in life and with regards to their pregnancy—that so many feel entitled to judge. As in TOMORROW, Sekuler’s camera becomes a tool for empathy, illuminating the most fraught moments in life—the act of dying, previously, and here the giving of birth—oftentimes in highly graphic ways. The film concludes with the delivery in all its hemic glory, but unlike some other films that use the emergence of a baby from the womb to either shock or regale, 36 HOURS revels in the process as the miracle it truly is. (2019, 76 min) KS
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Kôji Fukada’s A GIRL MISSING (Japan)
Available t0 rent through Facets Cinémathèque here and the Gene Siskel Film Center here
The three films I’ve seen by Japanese writer-director Kôji Fukada—HOSPITALITÉ, HARMONIUM, and now A GIRL MISSING—are commendable for the very quality that makes them difficult to write about—that is, they change shape unpredictably. The pleasure of discovering Fukada’s work is tied to being surprised by it; because I want readers to enjoy the movies, I don’t want to deny them the surprises. I will say that Fukada’s plot twists never feel manipulative or desperate, but rather they seem to emerge from the mysteries of life itself. Life takes strange turns, so movies should too, Fukada seems to be saying. In A GIRL MISSING, fate intervenes cruelly in the life of a home-care nurse played movingly by Fukada regular Mariko Tsutsui; the film’s twists are generally tragic in nature. What makes them especially sad is that the nurse, Ichiko, suffers so randomly. She isn’t punished for a past sin, as in many classical tragedies; rather, she’s the victim of circumstance (and, later, the kind of herd mentality that’s so pervasive online). Even before Fukada introduces the element of tragedy, A GIRL MISSING is a quietly fascinating film, due in large part to the perceptive way it observes the heroine’s life. Ichiko is the sort of character that narrative movies tend to neglect: she’s a single, childless middle-aged woman who can support herself just fine. She isn’t sick from lovelessness, like Katherine Hepburn’s beloved spinster in SUMMERTIME, but something seems precarious about her life. Fukada presents the minutiae of Ichiko’s job as though her career hangs in a delicate balance, as though any small mistake could bring her downfall. The worst does occur, but Fukada holds off on letting it happen, cutting away from the story Atom Egoyan-style to a second story line about Ichiko’s bourgeoning relationship with a younger male hairdresser. How these narratives converge comprises another one of Fukada’s successful surprises. (2019, 111 min) BS
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
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. It's seductively haunting a telling of this story now as it was 150 years ago. (2019, 96 min) RJM
Catalina Arroyave Restrepo’s DAYS OF THE WHALE (Colombia)
Available to 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 for 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 maintain 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 slum section of the city. But while Simon wants to fight society at any chance, Cristina is much more hesitant—her mother was forced to flee the city, and the family, 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 a loose one. The film cares more about mood, atmosphere, and environment than 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). And like those films, there are definitely stakes at play in DAYS OF THE WHALE, and they are high. But as opposed to the violence we see used by the youths 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 that 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 doesn’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
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
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 dragged out to reach that running time, nor does it fall short in getting its 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
Mehrdad Oskouei’s 2019 Iranian/Norwegian film SUNLESS SHADOWS (74 min) is available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Facets website for hold-over titles. Check here for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Ramona S. Diaz’s 2020 US/Filipino documentary A THOUSAND CUTS (110 min) and Melina Leon’s 2019 Peruvian/Spanish/US film SONG WITHOUT A NAME (97 min) are available for streaming beginning this week.Check here for hold-over titles.
Music Box Theatre
Scott Crawford’s 2019 documentary CREEM: AMERICA’S ONLY ROCK ‘N’ ROLL MAGAZINE (75 min) and Hans Petter Moland’s 2019 Norwegian film OUT STEALING HORSES (122 min) 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
Stephen Cone x 3
Now available to stream on the Criterion Channel with subscription; these are each available on other streaming services as well
Stephen Cone's HENRY GAMBLE'S BIRTHDAY PARTY (US)
Across eight features and numerous shorts, Chicago-based independent filmmaker Stephen Cone has carved out an indelible niche in America’s 21st-century cinematic landscape. The son of a southern Baptist minister who came to filmmaking by way of theater, Cone has made a name for himself by chronicling the eternal conflict between the ways of the flesh and the spirit—always with an impressively humanistic eye and often within an adolescent/LGBTQ context. His heartfelt movies have steadily won over festival audiences and critics since THE WISE KIDS premiered nearly a decade ago but Cone stands to gain deservedly wider recognition than ever before now that the prestigious Criterion Channel is spotlighting three of his best films. HENRY GAMBLE’S BIRTHDAY PARTY, Cone’s seventh feature, is an ideal introduction to his work for the uninitiated. It’s a coming-of-age story in which an individual's coming of age is telescoped into a single day and location: the titular 17th birthday party of the son of a “megachurch” pastor. The party takes place mainly in and around a backyard swimming pool and is populated by a large cast of teenage characters (i.e., Henry Gamble’s religious and secular friends) as well as their adult parents. Central among the many external and internal conflicts depicted in this charged suburban milieu is Henry’s coming to terms with his sexual identity. Although it has its cinematic forebears (an opening scene in which the closeted-gay Henry masturbates with his hetero best friend Gabe is an explicit homage to André Téchiné’s WILD REEDS), the film ultimately impresses for its cultural specificity: Cone has stated that the starting point for his original screenplay was the act of making a list of people he knew from childhood, a strategy that clearly pays dividends when it comes to such humorously authentic lines of dialogue as “Are you churched?” or “Well, Jesus drank.” Cone also admirably avoids stereotypes—he’s especially good at showing, in a realistic manner, how the tiniest cracks can appear in the belief systems of his evangelical characters—and his script is brought to life by a fine ensemble cast (Nina Ganet as Henry’s repressed older sister Autumn and Elizabeth Laidlaw as their long-suffering mother are especially good) and Jason Chiu’s masterful widescreen cinematography. (2015, 87 min) MGS
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Stephen Cone’s PRINCESS CYD (US)
When I think of Chicago summers, I can’t help but think of PRINCESS CYD. Its characters—like the city that engulfs them—are warm, tender, and ultimately unforgettable. And even though I still live in this city, putting on PRINCESS CYD makes me feel nostalgic for a Chicago I cannot see right now, at least not in the way I remember it. Part coming-of-age story, part love-letter to the written word, PRINCESS CYD follows a teenage girl (Jessie Pinnick) as she visits her novelist aunt Miranda (Rebecca Spence) in Chicago for the summer. Cyd and Miranda don’t see eye to eye on many things—Cyd doesn’t really care about books or have a connection with faith like her aunt—but it’s not a relationship that can simply be written off by generational differences. Rather, they are two complicated women at odds with each other and themselves, and not once do they compromise who they are to better fit the other. At the same time, Cyd finds herself smitten with Katie (Malic White), a barista at a neighborhood coffee shop, even though Cyd has a boyfriend back home. Cyd navigates the unfamiliar territory in her life—both being in a new space and her feelings for Katie—not so much with grace, but with a clumsy and contradictory sense of teenagedom. Even amidst its sun-kissed, laissez faire landscape, PRINCESS CYD isn’t afraid to sit in its own tension, even if it is just a simmering one. Over his extensive body of work, writer-director Stephen Cone has mastered the art of the ensemble—from THE WISE KIDS to HENRY GAMBLE’S BIRTHDAY PARTY. That masterwork is featured to some extent in PRINCESS CYD through Miranda’s parties with her fellow writers, in which they read their own work or the work of classic authors into the wee hours of the night. But the real heart of PRINCESS CYD’s lies in its laser-focus approach to Cyd’s individual relationships, along with her ever-evolving relationship with herself and who she wants to be. (2017, 96 min) CC
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Stephen Cone's THE WISE KIDS (US)
Near-constant immersion in the secular artistic communities of Chicago can only vaguely sustain the illusion that this playground of productive self-expression and/or hedonism is anything more than a shadow on a broad landscape of Christianity stretching to the horizon and beyond. While the art houses trend towards, at best, the decomposed Catholicism of Western Europe (and at worst the drooling contempt of RELIGULOUS and JESUS CAMP), few films are ready to take cultural egalitarianism seriously enough to respectfully depict the provincial, family-oriented, frequently-conservative Protestant traditions that so many of you fake city slickers came from in the first place. THE WISE KIDS, a new Kickstarter-backed independent feature directed by Chicago-based filmmaker Stephen Cone (though the film was shot in South Carolina), considers the post-high-school transition for three close friends in a Southern Baptist community (not wildly divergent from more proximate evangelical parishes) and uses the setting not to condescend but to take on some pretty serious questions: the role of homosexuality, and of secular education and knowledge, within a close-knit, ardent scriptural-literalist tradition. Instead of indicting a repressive and closed-minded hegemony (and thus implicitly celebrating the epicurean, worldly alienation of the big city), Cone and his talented young actors highlight the realistically thoughtful interior and social struggles of these protagonists as they approach escape velocity from this simultaneously restrictive and virtuously ecstatic moral order. (2011, 95 min) MC
Alan Rudolph’s RAY MEETS HELEN (US)
Available to stream for free on Tubi
The first film in 15 years by writer-director Alan Rudolph, RAY MEETS HELEN should have been one of the American cinematic events of the 2010s; instead it failed to find a U.S. theatrical distributor and quietly turned up online some months after its May 2018 premiere. Rudolph’s continued marginalization is a shame, as he all but created his own genre in the 1980s, bringing together the expressive visual language of film noir, the intricate dialogue of screwball comedy, and the romantic sensibility of much French art cinema. Almost no one has made movies like Rudolph’s in the director’s absence (Azazel Jacobs’ THE LOVERS is a commendable exception), but then no one ever really made movies like his before. RAY MEETS HELEN is quirky and wise in the tradition of the director’s best work (CHOOSE ME, TROUBLE IN MIND, LOVE AT LARGE), even though it lacks the budget to achieve the florid beauty of those movies. Here, Rudolph asks generally what makes life worth living and specifically what it means to grow old in the Information Age, which touts its interconnectivity while fostering loneliness and social withdrawal. Keith Carradine (a veteran Rudolph collaborator making another welcome return) plays Ray, an unhealthy 70-ish bachelor with lots of stories to tell but nothing to show for them. Sondra Locke (one of the sadly underused talents of American movies, in what would be her final performance) is Helen, a 70-ish bachelorette who explains to a loan officer near the start of the film that all her family and friends are dead. For the first half of RAY MEETS HELEN, Rudolph alternates between these two strangers as they both improbably acquire large sums of money. Helen comes upon a suicide whose final letter entitles the reader to her entire fortune; Ray catches a little boy stealing stacks of cash from a wrecked armored car, then cons the boy out of the loot. As neither protagonist had much hope left in life, their acquisition of so much money seems like a pathetic joke. Indeed the characters are so bewildered by their good fortune they don’t know what to do with it. Both decide to live it up, and they cross paths in one of those tacky expensive restaurants that look like rich people’s living rooms. Ray sees Helen sitting alone, decides to flirt with her, and soon they’re off on a spending spree, evoking Preston Sturges’ immortal comedy CHRISTMAS IN JULY. If the premise recalls Sturges, then the impoverished aesthetic recalls another giant of 1940s American cinema: Poverty Row magician Edgar G. Ulmer. Like many an Ulmer film, RAY MEETS HELEN takes place in a weirdly depopulated urban environment where the same sets of people keep intersecting with one another and fate plays a heavy hand in human affairs. Yet fate is kind in Rudolph’s world, delivering romance to two lonely souls. The film’s second half centers on Carradine and Locke as they fall in love, and their chemistry is one of the sweetest achievements in Rudolph’s filmography. (2017, 113 min) BS
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 has reopened in a limited capacity, presenting physical, in-theater screenings and also continues to present online-only screenings*
CLOSED/POSTPONED/HIATUS:
Asian Pop-Up Cinema – 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 (UIC) *
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 and the Pickwick Theatre) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Festivals:
Rescheduled with new dates announced:
The Chicago Latino Film Festival – Originally scheduled for April, the Chicago Latino Film Festival will take place as a delayed online edition September 18-27. Information will be available mid- to late-August at www.chicagolatinofilmfestival.org.
Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival (presented by Chicago Filmmakers) has announced that the festival will take place online September 24-October 4. Information will be available at https://reelingfilmfestival.org.
Postponed with no announced plans yet:
The Cinepocalypse film festival (June) – 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: August 7 - August 13, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Cody Corrall, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, JB Mabe, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Metzger, Michael Glover Smith, Fred Tsao