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.
CINE-FILE SELECTS: JÁNOS VITÉZ
Extended until October 1!
In partnership with film distributor Arbelos, Cine-File is presenting the exclusive Chicago virtual screening of Marcell Jankovics’ 1973 animated Hungarian feature JÁNOS VITÉZ, in a stunning new digital restoration, as a follow-up to our presentation of Jankovics’ SON OF THE WHITE MARE (1981). The film is available here through Thursday, September 24; rental is $10, with half the proceeds going to Cine-File (funds will be used for general expenses, future programming, and to provide honoraria to our contributors).
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Marcell Jankovics' JÁNOS VITÉZ (Hungary/Animation)
In 1845, Hungarian poet and revolutionary Sándor Petőfi wrote an epic poem and, nearly 130 years later, director Marcell Jankovics adapted this poem into the country’s first animated feature film, JÁNOS VITÉZ. Titled JOHNNY CORNCOB in English, the film speeds through its story, following a young shepherd in love with a local woman, who is overworked and under-loved. After losing his flock, the shepherd gets run out of his village, embarking on a journey through distant lands. He joins an army, fights in battle, saves a princess, becomes rich, conquers the giants, and sails to the edge of the world. Influenced heavily by the 1968 animated film YELLOW SUBMARINE, Jankovics' debut looks psychedelic, injecting bright, warm colors, and constantly shifting shapes and imagery. The filmmaker shows a willingness to experiment with the surreal, as he opts for graphics that awe and confuse, rather than help to tell a linear story. At times, JÁNOS VITÉZ feels like a modern music video, using its characters to form the surroundings they inhabit, tingeing every person the hero comes across in different colors, simply to contrast him with the rest of the exhaustive, evil, violent world. Jankovics’ film keeps you engaged with a quick runtime, striking animation, creative scenery and transitions, and a sense that these images mean more than meets the eye. It’s a story fueled by love, by loss, and by the fragility of life. In a film mostly void of dialogue, JÁNOS VITÉZ finds its director looking at Hungarian traditions, commenting on status and wealth, and providing a compelling and oft-interesting, if weird, view of a tale as old as time: a person scouring the world looking for his long-lost love. (1973, 74 min) [Michael Frank]
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Available to rent here.
PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Christopher Nolan’s TENET (US)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
Christopher Nolan has a fascination with time in nearly all of his movies, whether it’s the dilation of time as in INTERSTELLAR, the deconstruction of narrative time as in MEMENTO, or telling a story utilizing different increments of time as in DUNKIRK. TENET marks the first time in which he actually tackles time travel. The film centers on a CIA agent known only as The Protagonist (John David Washington) who’s placed on a mission to stop a global terror threat that could end the world. His only hope to accomplish this task is through the use of time inversion, which essentially allows him to interact with the world around him while time flows in reverse. TENET is Nolan’s most technically accomplished film, with ornate, awe-inspiring action sequences and impressive visual effects, many of which are accomplished in camera. It’s a clear homage to many of the James Bond films and, particularly, to the grand, often-times outlandish global plots found in that franchise’s entries from the ‘90’s and ‘00’s. In fact, the entire film seems to be constructed around its grandiose moments of visual splendor. Much of the film’s exposition relies on key-conversations amongst The Protagonist and several other characters, which can be frustratingly difficult to comprehend at times due to TENET’s sound design, which prioritizes the cacophony of its action sequences and its booming score. Nevertheless, the film offers viewers many clues needed to unlock its narrative puzzle, though, like other Nolan films, it may demand multiple viewings to fully decript. (2020, 151 min, 70mm) [Kyle Cubr]
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Hugh Schulze’s 2020 film DREAMING GRAND AVENUE (99 min, DCP Digital) also plays this week.
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More info on the in-person Music Box screenings (including COVID policies) at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
REELING: THE CHICAGO LGBTQ+ INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival (presented by Chicago Filmmakers) is taking place virtually this year, with online screenings through October 4. The full schedule and additional information are here. Selected films available this week are reviewed below.
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End of the World as You Know it (Shorts Program)
Available to rent Friday, September 25 through Monday, September 28
As the current events of 2020 have reminded us, there is the impulse to perceive in times of great turbulence the preamble to our annihilation. The very moving films in this program, all of which explicitly, indirectly, or serendipitously dovetail with our contemporary global crises, approach such catastrophizing from a distinctly LGBTQ perspective. That is to say, they are imbued with the particular anxieties of a community that has so often been forced to imagine itself without a future. Yet in place of despair, the characters in these shorts choose to embrace another fundament of the LGBTQ experience: defiance. This attitude persists in Leandro Goddinho’s rousing BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE (15 min), even as the lives and careers of its closeted Brazilian musicians are imperiled by industry rumors and, most pressingly, the election of Jair Bolsonaro. Holed up in a hotel room to escape paparazzi flashbulbs and raucous crowds, the boys gradually come to palliate their panic with love, culminating in an electrifying, chatter-silencing kiss. A world-stopping (or is it world-moving?) snog also factors into Thanasis Tsimpinis’ ESCAPING THE FRAGILE PLANET (17 min). In a dystopian Athens where citizens must wear face masks in defense against a toxic pink fog, a young man falls for a record store clerk. Fully aware the end of the world is nigh, the pair decides to make every moment count. The pulsing synth score and elegant, fuchsia-tinged 4:3 frames make this an especially sensuous apocalypse, where gay love comes up against the limits of Earth itself, and refuses to fold. From the cosmic to the intimately personal, Conlan Carter’s EXCHANGE (11 min) views mortal anxieties from the hermetic perspective of Javier, an HIV-positive agoraphobe who musters the courage to arrange a date in his apartment. While the prospect of romance can’t quite defeat his compulsion for rubber gloves and cleaning fluids, it’s Javier’s lovely connection with his female best friend that’s able to take the edge off. Fears of infection take center stage as well in Carla Simón’s IF THEN ELSE (26 min). Playing like a standalone episode of a series, the film takes a sensitive, slice-of-life look at the circumstances of the bisexual Edu, whose worries about a possible HIV diagnosis put a wedge between him, the former boyfriend responsible for the transmission, and his current girlfriend. Without sentiment, Simón posits compassion and open communication as answers to a personal quagmire that can seem unsolvable. The longest title of the lot, Edgar García’s THE GUST (30 min) also features the most complex characterizations. Taking place in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, it chronicles the unsteadily evolving relationship between Adrian, a forlorn middle-aged man, and Rafa, his strapping athlete neighbor. The hurricane’s effects are not merely dramatic backdrop, but signs of a social reality that inflects every moment between the men, who must negotiate the emotional and material poverties of a community left in tatters. Jafet Ortiz is sensational as Adrian, revealing a deep well of sadness, shame, and longing as he becomes an unlikely confidant to the even more economically vulnerable Rafa. Thanks to a surprising, cathartic coda, however, they emerge not as victims but as agents of possibility, pushing back against the world. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Trinh Dinh Le Minh’s GOODBYE MOTHER (Vietnam)
Available to rent Saturday, September 26 through Tuesday, September 29
It’s often hard enough introducing a significant other to the family under normal circumstances; it’s that much more challenging when that significant other is a same-sex partner from a foreign country you’ve been living in together, and when your conservative family, unaware of your sexuality, depends on your imminent marriage—and reproduction!—to secure their inheritance. In such a scenario, one would be forgiven for not mentioning that their significant other is at all significant. This is exactly the strategy taken by Nau (Lanh Thanh) in the gentle, bittersweet drama GOODBYE MOTHER, a film about the eternal conflict between family allegiance and personal desire. An introvert who has returned to his Vietnamese childhood home on the anniversary of his father’s passing, Nau surprises his family when he shows up with a partner in tow: Ian (Vo Dien Gia Huy), a nursing student from the U.S. Presented as a “friend,” Ian is quickly accepted into Nau’s bustling extended family, no more so than by his senescent grandma, who mistakes the boy for her own grandson. But tensions are thick: while Nau does everything he can to avoid revealing the truth about his relationship with the increasingly flustered Ian, he also must negotiate the expectations of his mother and relatives, who require his betrothal as a means of taking over the family estate and fortune (the patriarch had run a successful ceramics manufacturing business). Moreover, his torn loyalties are echoed in his ambivalence about leaving the relatively tolerant U.S. for Vietnam. Observing this story of a gay man figuring out how to buck an age-old, heterosexist paradigm, I was reminded of Jack Halberstam’s concept of “queer time,” an experience that exists outside “the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity… and inheritance.” GOODBYE MOTHER hardly embodies the idea in form—its narrative beats are comfortably, familiarly linear, its aesthetic generic—but the sentiment still resonates. Taking a swipe at the institution of biological family but never dismissing its value, the film is perhaps most powerful in its suggestion that embracing queerness doesn’t have to mean saying goodbye to the ties that bind. (2019, 107 min) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Posy Dixon’s KEYBOARD FANTASIES: THE BEVERLY GLENN-COPELAND STORY (UK/Documentary)
Available to rent Saturday, September 26 through Tuesday, September 29
Before we assess the relative strengths and limitations of Posy Dixon’s KEYBOARD FANTASIES: THE BEVERLY GLENN-COPELAND STORY, a word about the man himself: born in Philadelphia in 1944 and raised in a Quaker community, Glenn-Copeland (or Glenn) migrated to Montreal in the 1960s to study music at McGill University. Black, queer, and visionary, Glenn faced extreme ostracism, but came away with enough classical vocal training to hang with folk musicians and jazz virtuosi alike on two dreamlike, Tim Buckley-ish albums in the early 70s. (I’m particularly fond of 1971’s Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a sinuous and intuitive affair that features tragic guitar legend Lenny Breau supporting Glenn’s soaring voice) After transitioning to a man a decade later, Glenn returned to music, employing synthesizers and computer sequencers to produce Keyboard Fantasies, an album of particularly buoyant and lyrical new age music. Posy Dixon’s documentary confirms what Glenn-Copeland’s sparse discography intimates: Glenn is a rare, affirmative presence in the world. A figure of seemingly unbounded energy and particular affinity for youth, it’s no surprise to learn that he spent 25 years as a regular on the Canadian children’s show Mr. Dressup—not that you’d learn that from this documentary, which seems to tell a very abridged version of the Beverly Glenn-Copeland story. The film, which weds backstage and live performance footage to abstract musical interludes and archivally-enhanced recollections, is somewhat myopically fascinated with Glenn-Copeland’s electronic music. Rediscovered by a Japanese cassette dealer and reissued in to effusive praise in 2016, Keyboard Fantasies is a marvelous work of switched-on Black spiritualism, every bit the equal of Laraaji’s Day of Radiance, Alice Coltrane’s Turiya Sings, or the work of Lonnie Holley. But its genesis and quiet (if temporary) passing into oblivion seems like a brief interlude in a rich, singular, yet quiet life, one which may not reward observation through the lens of hipster hype. Perhaps that’s why so much of the film is given over to behind-the-scenes footage of the septuagenarian’s 2018 European comeback tour, where we can see Glenn-Copeland pivot from an infectiously free-spirited experimentalism to deep gospel solemnity with characteristic grace. Unlike some of Glenn-Copeland’s well-rehearsed interviews, these performances have a spontaneity that Dixon is up to the challenge of capturing. Backstage, however, Dixon has as hard a time keeping up with her subject as do Glenn’s millennial bandmates, who also view him with reverence, affection, and perhaps a drop of twee condescension. Not that any of that matters to Glenn, an unlikely dynamo whose fantasies seem to extend quite a lot farther than the keyboard. (2019, 62 min) [Michael Metzger]
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Elegance Bratton’s PIER KIDS (US/Documentary)
Available to rent Sunday, September 27 through Wednesday, September 30
The stark documentary PIER KIDS focuses on the experiences of the homeless queer youth community of New York City’s Christopher Street Pier. The film opens with a note about the Stonewall Riots, forcing viewers to engage with the often-overlooked position of people of color in the history of queer rights, and how they are still a disproportionally marginalized group, greatly affected by homelessness. Director and cameraman Elegance Bratton draws on his own experiences as a homeless gay youth, letting his subjects speak for themselves in this “safe zone” (as one subject refers to the Christopher Street Pier). Bratton highlights a few specific stories, including Krystal, a black transgender woman, who relies on sex work to get by as she participates in the local drag scene. Another youth, Desean, appears throughout the documentary and bluntly discusses the limited and dangerous options of getting off the streets, even contemplating intentionally becoming HIV+, as it almost guarantees being placed in housing. Both Krystal and Desean are rejected by their families for coming out as queer, a situation shared by many of the youth interviewed by Bratton. Krystal’s family participates in the documentary, outspokenly discussing their struggles with her identifying as a woman. What is most dynamic about PIER KIDS, however, is Bratton’s camera—naturally moving throughout the city, capturing both incidents of violence and crime, as well as celebratory moments of dancing and community. There is no one main narrative, and the film’s strength is found in how it travels between subjects, some of whom only appear once, but leave an impact that indicates how vast the issue of homelessness is in this community. Bratton’s voice is often heard off-camera asking questions, positioning himself within the stories of these vulnerable youth. This direct engagement allows for so many of the young people occupying the space of Christopher Street Pier to openly discuss their experiences and PIER KIDS candidly highlights the marginalized position of being a homeless queer person of color. (2019, 84 min) [Megan Fariello]
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Something Wicked This Way Comes (Shorts Program)
Available to rent Thursday, October 1 through Sunday, October 4
Reeling’s shorts program Something Wicked This Way Comes features three unsettling stories, each grappling with themes of obsession and isolation. BLAME IT ON TOBY (2018, 48 min), directed by Richard Knight, Jr., is the most traditional horror of the three shorts, paying homage to the demonic doll subgenre. Young couple Calvin (JJ Phillips) and Edward (Christopher Sheard) are out to dinner when Calvin decides to propose. Not only is Edward reluctant, wanting to wait until they are more financially stable, but the proposal is interrupted by an eccentric, and extremely wealthy, older gentleman, Arthur Prentiss-Wilcox (Kevin J. O’Connor) and the creepy doll he always carries with him, Toby. The couple overlook this peculiarity, and agree to have dinner at his mansion, hoping to take advantage of Arthur’s generosity and immense wealth. Predictably, Arthur’s eccentricities and his relationship with Toby are far more sinister than Calvin and Edward imagine as they get further enmeshed in the horrors surrounding the man and his precious doll. While BLAME IT ON TOBY may feel familiar, Kevin J. O’Connor’s measured performance as the unnerving Arthur is particularly captivating. In IMMORTAL (2020, 10 min), directed by Natalie Metzger and Robert Allaire, a geneticist, Anna (Laura Coover), goes rogue to experiment with death defying treatments. The camera slowly moves throughout her home, showing a mostly solitary existence, but filled with experiments involving plants and rats and, most shockingly, a comatose human subject (Doug Scroope). The glowing sunlit space juxtaposes the more insidious work suggested by her experiments. When Anna’s partner, Harper (Meredith Casey) surprises her with a visit, she faces choosing between her work to gain the secret to immortality and her already fraying relationship. Surrealist horror LIMERENCE (2020, 34 min), directed by Dan Pedersen, takes place in an old movie palace. Phoebe (Angela Riccetti) works as the projectionist, as well as lives above the theater; her life is relatively isolated and her obsession with physical film is clear from her opening monologue about the flammable dangers of nitrate film—fire is a visual theme throughout LIMERENCE. Things start to get particularly strange after Phoebe encounters a charming woman, Tig (Michaela Petro), who stops by the theater requesting to post flyers for a local play. Phoebe becomes infatuated with Tig, as the woman manifests in her fantasies. Phoebe’s preoccupation with film is reflected in LIMERENCE’s saturated colors and lingering on film technology, adding to the distortion between reality and fantasy within the remarkable space of the antique movie palace. The most striking element of LIMERENCE, however, is not the fantasies she experiences, but the depiction of Phoebe as physically embodying the projection equipment she obsesses over. [Megan Fariello]
CHICAGO LATINO FILM FESTIVAL
The Chicago Latino Film Festival is taking place virtually this year, with online screenings through September 27. The full schedule and additional information are here. Selected films available this week are reviewed below.
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Bahman Tavoosi’s THE NAMES OF THE FLOWERS (Bolivia)
Available to rent till Saturday, September 26
On October 8, 1967, Che Guevara was captured by CIA-backed Bolivian special forces as he was organizing a revolutionary army in a rugged region of Bolivia. He was taken to the nearby village of La Higuera, populated mainly by indigenous Guaraní, and interrogated at a rundown schoolhouse several hours before being murdered the next day. In between, he met with a 22-year-old schoolteacher named Julia Cortez. Although there are records of what passed between them, director Bahman Tavoosi has created a mythical exchange of soup and poetry that forms the bones of THE NAMES OF THE FLOWERS. An old woman (Bárbara Cameo de Flores) who claims she was that schoolteacher walks each day to the schoolhouse with a tureen of soup and a vase containing two massive flowers. A mentally challenged man (José Luis Garibaldi Durán) follows her bearing a framed photo of her as a young woman. They set the three items up in the school like an altar. It is assumed that this ritual and her story bring her some income from curious tourists, though none are ever seen to visit her. As the 50th anniversary of Che’s death approaches and, with it, government-sanctioned festivities in La Higuera, an army colonel (Sergio Wilson Tapia Echalar) and several other officials come to town to clamp down on illegitimate tourist activities. They specifically want to check the old woman’s story out, as there have been other women who claim to have served Che. THE NAMES OF THE FLOWERS explores the quest for a truth that is less important than the power of myth to make a few lives a little better. Perhaps the old woman was an opportunist at first, but after so many years, her devotions have taken on religious proportions that give her purpose. By contrast, the government’s punitive attempts to find the “real” schoolteacher are kind of head-scratching, not to mention hypocritical, considering that their predecessors tried to stage Che’s execution as the result of a nonexistent battle. Beautifully framed with rich color saturation in Bolivia’s high country, THE NAMES OF THE FLOWERS is a thought-provoking and pleasurable experience. (2019, 79 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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João Nicolau’s TECHNOBOSS (Portugal)
Available to rent till Saturday, September 26
Why make a musical comedy about a laidback 60-something divorcé who installs security systems for a living? That’s the question behind TECHNOBOSS, and writer-director-editor João Nicolau’s refusal to provide a satisfying answer (other than maybe “Why not?”) serves as its central joke. The movie trades in conceptual humor—indeed, it might be funnier to think about than it is to watch. It’s a musical in which no one sings well, and the action is so minimal and deadpan that the most exciting episode has to take place offscreen. Nicolau’s comedy may be arch, but it isn’t flippant. TECHNOBOSS advances a generous worldview, treating all the characters with sympathy and finding interest in what might appear like dull, white-collar drudgery. Yes, Luís Rovisco sells and installs security systems, but he likes his job; he gets to drive all over the Iberian Peninsula and meet different people. He’s also about to retire, which means he doesn’t have to work very hard either. This character makes for good company, especially as he’s portrayed by Miguel Lobo Antunes, a noted Portuguese arts administrator making his acting debut. Antunes throws himself into the part despite his limitations as a performer; much of the movie’s charm stems from his endearing amateurishness. Nicolau compliments the lead performance with numerous homespun devices: a few scenes in which Luís drives to an appointment are clearly staged in a parked car with a moving, painted backdrop behind it; in other scenes, Nicolau forgoes settings entirely and presents the action with the actors and a few props in a dark room; and the music, which ranges from synth pop to heavy metal, is all plainly lo-fi. The songs are also quite catchy; the title song (about the trademarked security system Luís installs) was in my head for days after I watched this. (2019, 112 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’s AMALIA (US)
Available to rent Friday, September 25 through Sunday, September 27
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, more famously known as the guitarist for post-hardcore/rock groups At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta, goes full film auteur with his haunting, black and white, first feature-length film. Written, directed, and produced by Lopez this film is a surrealistic nightmare of un/subconscious fear and desire. The term “Lynchian” gets thrown around a lot, so much so that it’s basically become an almost meaningless synonym for “weird.” But it’s hard to think of a more applicable term here. There is a dream logic in Amalia’s story that only she is privy to, and even then, only in part. What is real and what is imagined is impossible to know, but also irrelevant to figure out. Amalia Velazquez has recently lost her mother and finds her husband cheating on her while she is still in mourning. Shortly after that, the husband dies under mysterious circumstances. With her whole world swiftly destroyed, she becomes infatuated with her husband’s lover and descends into a world of dark confusion. With use of black and white (sumptuously photographed by Adam Thomson), jazzy noir scoring, and visual grotesqueries, the Lynch influence and comparison is both apt and obvious. Still, there is a true visual experimentation going on in AMALIA that brings to mind the eeriness of the works of Maya Deren, E. Elias Merhige’s experimental horror film BEGOTTEN, and even the films of David Cronenberg. Bluntly put, this movie is unsettling as hell. It’s also quite confusing at points, but purposefully so. The unreliability of everyone on screen, and seemingly behind the camera as well, in telling the story makes AMALIA a mystery that very well may be unsolvable, but utterly gripping. So often films are cynically made and marketed to become instant Midnight Movies. The filmmakers bake-in a cult appeal in order to create some kind of artificial legacy. AMALIA is the type of movie these folks could never make if you put a gun to their head. This is a truly weird film for true freaks. A generation ago this would have been passed hand-to-hand on third-generation dubbed VHS tapes like some kind of strange contraband. AMALIA is a true artistic statement, one that manages to bridge that uncanny valley of art where horror and discomfort becomes beauty. (2018, 97 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Felipe Rios Fuentes’ THE MAN OF THE FUTURE (Argentina/Chile)
Available to rent Friday, September 25 through Sunday, September 27
In his first feature, Felipe Rios Fuentes successfully establishes a distinctive sensibility that’s earthy, tender, and nuanced. It’s structured like William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms (aka If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem), alternating between two stories with similar details and themes. But where Faulkner crafted parallel narratives, Fuentes charts storylines that eventually intersect. The film begins with veteran truck driver Michelsen, the so-called Columbus of Patagonian truckers because he was the first to travel many routes in southern Chile. Michelsen learns from his boss that he’s being retired and that his next trip will be his last. Meanwhile Michelsen’s estranged teenage daughter Elena decides to leave her small rural town of Cochrane to fight in an amateur boxing match further south; she hopes this trip, which she’ll make with a friendly trucker called Four Fingers, marks the start of her boxing career. Fuentes cuts between father and daughter, and while certain details rhyme from one narrative to the next (e.g., Michelsen gives a ride to a female hitchhiker around the time Four Fingers agrees to drive Elena), there are no obvious likenesses or dichotomies in the principal characterizations. Michelsen and Elena are both defined by solitude, but this has more to do with their shared geography—the highways and small towns of southern Chile—than any common psychology. Fuentes creates a sense of fluidity between the narratives with his subtle, observational style: everywhere he goes, he finds details worth celebrating in blue-collar life and Patagonian terrain. THE MAN OF THE FUTURE is ultimately celebratory despite its thematic emphasis on endings and defeat. The curious, sympathetic perspective is life-affirming, especially when the two main characters unite in the final act. Michelen and Elena are believably reserved with each other, yet they also surprise with their generosity and kindness. Fuentes shot the film in widescreen, and he uses it most purposefully when he shows two faces in close-up or two bodies in tight medium-shot. This is a movie about how we form intimate and memorable connections with others. (2019, 96 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Sandra Kogut’s THREE SUMMERS (Brazil)
Available to rent Friday, September 25 through Sunday, September 27
A palatial playground for the rich and carefree is the setting for Brazilian director Sandra Kogut’s tale of resilience. In the Southern Hemisphere summer arrives in December, making Christmas and New Year’s celebrations especially hard work for the staff who attend to the needs of power couple Edgar (Otávio Müller) and Marta (Gisele Fróes). Herding the many guests to the couple’s 2016 festivities is Madá (Regina Casé), a dynamo of organization, ingenuity, and dedication. There is definitely something amiss this year, as Edgar sneaks away from the party to talk on his cellphone, disturbing his wife and forcing Madá to pursue him to secure R$10,000 he promised her to help her open her own food kiosk near the compound. The second summer finds the inhabitants of the big house scattered, and the staff left to find some way to support themselves, from selling the contents of the house to turning it into an Airbnb. By the final summer, Madá and her small “family” of coworkers have found a new way to live and celebrate. The film progresses in a haphazard way, dropping us into the story at these different intervals with no introductions or explanations and inviting us to piece together the plot if we are so inclined. The real reason to see this film is to enjoy the tour de force performance of award-winning actress and comedian Regina Casé. As events swirl confusingly around her, Casé makes Madá the strong center—a sort of benevolent Mother Courage—who keeps everyone, including the audience, looking ahead to a better tomorrow. I especially liked her relationship with the mostly silent Lira (Rogério Fróes), Edgar’s elderly father. Her kindness and devotion to him, and the appreciation he shows her when others take her for granted, is a model for us all. (2019, 94 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Ric Burns’ OLIVER SACKS: HIS OWN LIFE (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
If you ever read the stunning 2004 essay "In the River of Consciousness" by beloved neurologist and author Oliver Sacks (later included his similarly titled 2017 book), you'll find he had a better understanding of film and filmmaking than Ric Burns, the director of this charming hagiography of Sacks. The film undercuts the life and work of Sacks with sloppy visual generalizations. Sacks' brilliant writing on migraines and vision is illustrated with all the conceptual complexity of an Excedrin commercial, and Sacks' harrowing drug-fueled youthful motorcycle trips might as well be out-takes from 90s syndicated TV show Renegade. But forget all that! Despite the standard-issue mainstream documentary trappings, it's a delight to be around the funny, warm, and brilliant Sacks for two hours. For those unfamiliar, it's a fine introduction to his life and his work; for Sacks fans, it's a pleasurable reminder of why you love him, and occasionally offers some new insights from his friends, family, and admirers. Sacks is shown as a gracious and sincere man with corny jokes and dirty stories. He is shown as a man who struggled with family trauma, and sociality-imposed and internalized homophobia throughout his life, the beautiful effectiveness of therapy (from professionals and friends), the great value of swimming naked, and the occasional drug-aided/addled career decision. While Sacks deserves and will hopefully get a better film than this one, it's still absolutely worth your time to spend an evening reflecting on his life. (2019, 114 min) [Josh B. Mabe]
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Daria Price's DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
There are few things in the world that give me more joy that a well-played hoax. Hoaxes, schemes, scams, swindles, or cons, I love them all. They really show you how fragile our society actually is. How so much of what we believe to be a bedrock of society is really just blind faith that what everyone else is saying or doing is actually true. But an art hoax? These might be my favorite hoaxes of all time. Art is so arbitrary already. The idea that there is a multi-billion-dollar industry that is the art world balancing on pieces of art is so fascinating. I often don’t understand how it works, and how everyone can be so sure that a painting worth $10 million actually is just that. DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION illuminates this issue by focusing on one of the greatest art hoaxes of all time, one with $80 million worth of forgeries—resulting in the closing of the oldest art gallery in NYC. The documentary investigates the scandal surrounding the Knoedler art gallery and its director, Ann Freedman. I say investigates because the film comes off very much like reportage. There’s a dryness to it that feels like a long form article in an arts magazine, or newspaper, more so than a film. We get a very standard amount of talking heads (mostly experts) and the ubiquitous partial zooms of still photos that so many modern docs have, all with a background score of mostly ignorable smooth jazz. But even with the formal elements of the film perhaps leaving something to be desired, the story itself is utterly fascinating; how the high minded, exclusive art world of NYC got tricked by an unknown Latinx art dealer and a Chinese immigrant painter is a story of hubris, deception, and self-deception. Frustratingly absent are interviews with those who pulled off the scam; we’re only left with the side of those who were had by them or eventually caught them, leaving a bit of one-sidedness to this oh-so-curious tale. Even so, we still have some of these experts tacitly admitting that which all of us on the outside of the art world wonder every day, “All of this is kinda bullshit, but that’s just the way it is.” It’s rare to have a secretive curtain pulled back by the gatekeepers themselves, especially on film. DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION satisfies if you’re at all interested the story of a great hoax, as an erudite discussion of what makes art valuable, or you just want a peek into the exclusive world of high-end NYC art dealings. (2020, 84 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Tsai Ming-liang’s THE HOLE (Taiwan)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
Among the myriad defining characteristics of the cinema of Tsai Ming-liang, perhaps none is as instantly evocative as the steady trickle of rain, tears, urine, and assorted other liquids that pervasively dampens his environments and characters. Water doesn’t just run across so many of the auteur’s films, it threatens to overflow them, seeping through walls and floors as the emergence of something insufficiently repressed, revealing the sometimes-stubborn boundaries of both modern Taipei and the human soul as, in fact, profoundly porous. Amazingly, in this most pluvial of filmographies, THE HOLE is possibly the drippiest of them all, or at least the one in which leakage takes on the most central metaphorical significance. Sometime just before the turn of the 21st century, a mysterious virus has taken over Taiwan, afflicting its victims with crazed, cockroach-like behavior. Despite mass evacuations and warnings that the government will shut off water in quarantined zones, a man (Lee Kang-sheng) and the woman living below him (Yang Kuei-mei) stay put in their apartments. If cabin fever weren’t enough to deal with, a botched plumbing operation has left a rubble-strewn hole in the floor separating the two units. Suddenly, these isolated strangers are made vexingly aware of their close proximity, with the cavity serving as a passageway for all manner of solids, liquids, aerosols, sounds, and, inevitably, appendages (it must be noted, however, that the prurient possibilities here are left strictly to the imagination). With echoes of the stifled would-be lovers of VIVE L’AMOUR and the psychosomatic malaise of the previous year’s THE RIVER, Tsai engages here in some of his most succinct, deadpan observations about the strange tensions of apartment dwelling and the percolating anomie of contemporary life. Yet what stands out about THE HOLE is not so much the dribbling, depopulated quasi-dystopia Tsai would hone to an acid tip with STRAY DOGS, but its surprising romanticism. At regular intervals, the film bursts into Technicolor song, with Yang’s frustrated, toilet paper-hoarding tenant lip-syncing 50s hits by Chinese chanteuse Grace Chang. Tsai figures these numbers explicitly as the woman’s fantasies, eventually bringing in her neighbor—now with pompadour—for some enchanting pas de deux. Humorously juxtaposing the bright music and dance of the fantasy with the dark, dank interiors and despondency of his end-of-the-millennium “reality,” Tsai validates a kind of movie escapism that for so long has served to inspire people in times of anxiety. Totally earnest or ironic, its insistent presence alone nevertheless reflects an impulse, a need, to believe in something better waiting on the other side. It’s yet one more element in Tsai’s cinema that punctures the dam, letting loose a flood of feeling that can hardly be contained. (1998, 90 min) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Melissa Haizlip and Sam Pollard’s MR. SOUL! (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
From 1968 through 1973, public television station WNET in New York embarked on an experiment in programming that would eventually stand as an influential cultural icon for generations of African-American artists. Soul!, a weekly one-hour talk and variety series produced by Ellis Haizlip, a Howard University-educated impresario in New York’s Black arts scene, was wholly dedicated to the talents and concerns of the Black community. Haizlip was ideally suited to elevate Black culture on TV, with his vast network of contacts, unerring radar for budding talents, and supreme belief in the value of presenting the finest that the Black civic and cultural community had to offer. Among the firsts on Soul! were the introduction of singing duo Ashford and Simpson before they had even cut their first album and the appearance of Toni Morrison reading from her first novel, The Bluest Eye. Haizlip loved dance and included performances by the Alvin Ailey Dancers and the George Faison Universal Dance Experience, among others. As MR. SOUL! highlights, there may never have been another show of any kind that was as great for poetry as Soul! was, including appearances by Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, and bucking the censors by booking Last Poets to perform their works. These performances make clear the generations-long continuum of poetic expression that has sustained the Black community and from which rap arose. Political activists Kathleen Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, Betty Shabazz, and Lynn Brown also showed up, and in one revealing clip, Haizlip, an out gay man, even got homophobic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to accept that gay converts to Islam were part of his flock. The musical guests were nonstop, from Stevie Wonder and Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles to the Billy Taylor Trio, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Billy Preston. And Haizlip did not forget the Black diaspora in other parts of the Americas, asking African-Latino-American Felipe Luciano, a member of Last Poets and the Young Lords Party, to introduce the Afro-Cuban rhythms of Tito Puente and Willie Colon and their orchestras to Soul!’s audience. Co-directors Melissa Haizlip (Ellis Haizlip’s niece) and Sam Pollard have assembled a dizzying array of personal photos, clips from Soul!, talking-head interviews with some of the guests who appeared on the show and those who were inspired by it, as well as archival footage of the roiling times during which Soul! aired and Haizlip’s own words delivered in voiceover by actor Blair Underwood. This approach helps viewers get acquainted with Haizlip and his history, but also locates him and his work within the societal attitudes that made Soul! possible and the darkening national landscape under President Richard Nixon that spelled the show’s doom. What Soul! meant to the Black community is best summed up by African-American writer Chester Himes (A Rage in Harlem, Cotton Comes to Harlem) who, along with the vocal group The Dells, was a featured guest on a 1972 episode: “This is one of the highlights of my life to be on this sort of Black television program before a Black audience, because this is the first experience that I have had.” I knew nothing about Soul! or the estimable Ellis Haizlip before watching MR SOUL! I am so happy to have been introduced to both. (2018, 99 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s RBG (US/Documentary)
Available for rent through Facets Cinémathèque here and the Music Box Theatre here
Is there any figure whose opinions are more routinely ignored, discounted, or even ridiculed in our contemporary society than an old woman’s? And yet—even before 2018 would become a summer defined by grueling media attention on the Supreme Court—Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an exception, able to quietly command attention and reverence through every word she utters. The alluring mystery at the heart of the biography RBG is Ginsburg herself, as a representation of the increasingly rare, public figure still able to inspire thoughtful reflection and advocacy, against the tide of our culture’s worst instincts. This buoyant profile of Ginsburg lovingly emphasizes her significance in various career roles, first as a feminist icon (crediting her as the architect behind the ACLU’s strategy for the women’s movement in the 1970s), then as the Court’s most accomplished litigator, and finally—in modern, increasingly traditionalist years—as the Court’s most forceful and resolute dissenting voice. Although West and Cohen’s doc frequently takes on all the trappings of a glossy magazine profile rather than the incisive portrait surely deserved by one of the greatest intellects of our time, it nevertheless benefits immeasurably from the remarkable, rejuvenating presence of Ginsburg herself. The weirdness of our culture’s Internet celebritydom becomes a part of RBG’s story too, but compared with Ginsburg’s depth, this maddening new source of cultural power feels like an entirely false and estranging one. Still, in an age of inadvertent stardom, it’s comforting to have a figure like RBG to idolize. (2018, 98 min) [Tien-Tien Jong]
Justine Triet's SIBYL (France)
Available for rent through the Music Box Theatre here
SIBYL is going to infuriate viewers who go to films to gain insight into the reasoning behind people’s behavior, and delight viewers who get off on puzzling out the logic that guides the construction of a work of art. The interplay between these two processes—the bad judgment that promises to tear lives and careers apart, the erratic impulses that improbably guide artists towards successful creation—is vividly, even ludicrously dramatized in Justine Triet’s film, which follows an established psychotherapist, Sibyl (Virginie Efira), as she abandons her practice to return to creative writing. Unable to extricate herself from Margot (Adèle Exarchopoulos), one of her needier clients, Sibyl begins surreptitiously recording their sessions, drawing on her patient’s drama for her own writing. Triet’s go-for-baroque plotting finds room to explore her heroine’s fraught relationships with her underemployed sister, AA group, son, partner, her other patients, and her own therapist, while multiple flashbacks peer into Sibyl’s reawakened memories of a passionate love affair gone sour. And that’s before things go fully meta, as Margot’s crisis—she’s an actress, pregnant from an affair with her co-star, and unable to decide whether to keep or terminate the pregnancy—gradually ensnares Sibyl as well. Once the therapist is called to help her patient make it through a tense film shoot on—get this—the volcanic island of Stromboli, the film’s lower-key comic elements erupt, thanks especially to the welcome midway addition of TONI ERDMANN’s Sandra Hüller as the disconcertingly pragmatic film director whose partner has been fooling around with Margot. The willful improbability of the second act will throw viewers for a loop, but it’s entirely in keeping with a film about the pleasures of breaking rules and taking license as a woman and as an artist. In this, I was reminded of two other recent films which contemplate female empowerment by dramatizing the pitfalls of the creative process, Greta Gerwig’s LITTLE WOMEN and Céline Sciamma’s PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN ON FIRE; like those films, SIBYL proposes that the social boundaries of acceptable behavior for women are inextricably linked to the boundaries of how art should or shouldn’t be composed. In all three films, narrative unfolds towards the fulfillment of creative desire, defiantly leaving a trail of broken rules behind—SIBYL just breaks more than the rest. (2019, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Metzger]
Video Art and Mass Incarceration—Part One (Experimental)
Available for free on VDB TV until 9/30
The four video works in this program are collectively a summation and individually revelations; the brutality of the United States prison system is on trial here, the filmmakers its judges, and we, the viewers, its jury. The first video, Annie Goldson and Chris Bratton’s THE DEATHROW NOTEBOOKS (1992, 13 min), is a provocation that’s unequivocal in its aim to evince the unembellished horrors of both our judicial system and the prison-industrial complex. It’s centered on a candid interview with Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist and revolutionary who at the time was on death row in Pennsylvania for killing a cop (he’s now serving a life sentence), and whose trial was rife with injustice. The video is split into sections about Abu-Jamal’s youth activism, his involvement with the Black Panthers, his observations on the racial injustices exercised against the Philadelphia-based MOVE organization (a back-to-nature organization targeted for their radical politics), and his trial and subsequent conviction. Footage of the interview—intercut with archival footage related to the topics Abu-Jamal is discussing, as well as expository title cards that further explain nuances related to the subject matter—often hones in on Abu-Jamal’s cuffed hands. The device is simple, but effective; the videomakers show incarceration for what it is—the confinement of a body, too often a body of color, and the restriction of movement, physical and otherwise. The next video, Harun Farocki’s I THOUGHT I WAS SEEING CONVICTS (2000, 25 min), taking its name from a line uttered by Ingrid Bergman’s character in Roberto Rossellini's EUROPA ‘51, elaborates on prison as a space in which these bodies are circumscribed. A two-channel video installation presented here as a single-channel video, with the frames overlapping, its essence is bound in correlation and contradiction. Using surveillance footage from a maximum-security prison in Corcoran, California (obtained through a FOIA request made by a civil rights group), Farocki takes a Foucauldian approach to the dehumanizing effects of the prison system and networks that mirror it in civilian life, such as supermarkets and factories. The video argues that all of these structures are predicated on the control of bodies within their spaces. Images themselves, as taken by surveillance apparatuses, are implicated; footage of inmates in a prison yard segues to a visual layout on which guards document the immates' identities and affiliations within the prison, allowing them to maintain control of its inhabitants from a measured distance. Both subtitles and a German woman’s voice narrate what’s on-screen—“Whoever controls the technical means is considered powerful,” she says. About the prisoners: “They have almost nothing: only their bodies and membership in a gang.” In his signature, rigid style, Farocki lays bare prisons as the logical conclusion of a passive surveillance state in which bodies are placed in an unwinnable battle against the mechanization of apathy. Lawrence Andrews’ AND THEY CAME RIDING INTO TOWN ON BLACK AND SILVER HORSES (1992, 30 min) explores ways in which representations of people of color perpetuate stereotypes of them as being criminals. Divided into verses seemingly out of order, the video alternates between elegiac and documentary approaches; some verses are opaque, others more forthright. The documentary sequences feature interviews with a law enforcement officer who trains other officers on how to handle guns; a police sketch artist who speaks to the difficulties witnesses experience when describing suspects; and, most importantly, Black men who have been wrongfully accused of crimes they didn’t commit. Andrews presents tortuous media representation and the criminal justice system as maddeningly discordant contrivances that stupefy the public into passing judgment on these people before they’re ever even on trial—sometimes before they're even arrested. Lastly, in SPACE GHOST (2007, 25 min), Laurie Jo Reynolds connects the experience of imprisonment to that of astronauts in space, using media about both to illustrate the uncanny similarities. In between visual representations of this metaphor, phone calls between Reynolds and her inmate brother can be heard; the conversations are mostly benign, with her brother ruminating on such topics as eggs, the magazines he likes, and the television shows they’re both watching. During the conversation about eggs, the two discuss the inhumane processes used in raising livestock, the parallel between people in prison and animals in cages unbroached but all too obvious. “Why do things seem like they’re just getting worse and worse?” asks Reynolds’ brother, heartbreakingly, when talking about the animals. “All kinds of stuff, you didn’t think it could get any worse… and then there’s more things that are just worse.” Many of us might be asking the same thing. [Kathleen Sachs]
Christopher Boone and Kevin Smokler’s VINYL NATION (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
Recently I’ve found an odd comfort in experimenting with low-tech electronics. I’ve been writing letters to friends old and new on an electric typewriter in attempts to be more offline. I cancelled my music streaming service in favor of an old iPod Nano and a weathered tape deck—anything that gives me a semblance of pause in an increasingly accelerated and hyper-online world. Vinyl records, naturally, seem like the next step in that journey. Christopher Boone and Kevin Smokler’s documentary VINYL NATION is a thorough examination on vinyl’s second wave and why we keep coming back to formats previously rendered obsolete. Featuring a wide array of interviewees—from music critics and historians, to DJs, musicians, and music producers—VINYL NATION chronicles the rise and fall and rise again of the record industry. It serves as a useful guide for those unfamiliar with the format's history: its origins, its popularity amongst consumers and musicians from various subgenres, how it differs from other audio formats, and how it’s adapted to a digital world. The film heralds the conception of Record Store Day—an annual consumer holiday featuring exclusive pressings and other limited-edition ephemera—as the thing that brought vinyl back into the mainstream. But sometimes the lines between how the film depicts saving a dying industry and outright glorifying capital—like Urban Outfitters’ commodification of vinyl, or the ever-Instagrammable Crosley’s—are a bit murky. Where VINYL NATION is most necessary is in its analysis of how the consumer culture of vinyl has changed. Young people, especially young women, are rapidly gravitating towards this format in large swaths, effectively changing the face of the industry. VINYL NATION is nothing if not a love letter to the community that brought a seemingly dying format back to life—and an enthusiastic look at its future. (2020, 92 min) [Cody Corrall]
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Chicago Palestinian Film Festival
The festival partners with the Gene Siskel Film Center to present a mix of eight streaming and drive-in screenings from September 25-October 16. The three drive-in screenings are on Thursdays (September 25, October 1, and October 8) and the five streaming films are available—for 24-hours only—on a variety of days from September 29-October 16. Full schedule and more info here.
Conversations at the Edge
The Conversations at the Edge series presents Alison O'Daniel - Artist Talk and Conversation on Thursday at 7pm. RSVP here. O'Daniel's ongoing project THE TUBA THIEVES (2013-continuing, 45 min) is streaming for free via the Gene Siskel Film Center from September 27–October 3 here.
Gallery 400 (UIC)
Guy Ben-Ner’s 2012 video FOREIGN NAMES (5 min) is available online through September 28 here.
Renaissance Society (UofC)
The Renaissance Society presents two videos online in conjunction with their current show Nine Lives. Streaming here through November 15 are: Marwa Arsanios’ 2014 video HAVE YOU EVER KILLED A BEAR? OR BECOMING JAMILA (26 min) and Tamar Guimarães’ 2018 video O ENSAIO [THE REHEARSAL] (51 min).
Video Data Bank
The Video Data Bank presents an extended online screening of Tirtza Even's 2014 documentary NATURAL LIFE (85 min) beginning on Thursday. It will be available here.
Sin Cinta Previa
Sin Cinta Previa and Chuquimarca present the free online screening Tempo falacioso; Superimposiciones botánicas, featuring PAISAGENS FICCIONAIS [Fictional Landscapes] (2020, 24 min) by Luíza Bastos Lages, THE DENSITY OF BREATH (2020, 13 min) by Nancy D. Valladares, and EXPECT PEOPLE TO BE EXHAUSTED (2020, 13 min) by Chucho Ocampo. A Zoom Q&A is on Saturday, September 26 at 7:30pm; details here.
Asian Pop-Up Cinema
Asian Pop-Up Cinema is presenting a series of drive-in screenings (through October 31) and online screenings (through October 10). The drive-in screenings are at the Davis Theater Drive-in at Lincoln Yards (1684 N. Throop St.). More information and ticket links here.
Northbrook Public Library
NPL presents newly-recorded introductions to five silent films by local film accompanist Dave Drazin. Each will be available on Wednesdays in September via the library’s website (registration is required to receive a viewing link; the films being introduced are not being hosted by the library—they would need to be viewed via Kanopy, Hoopla, or other streaming services). This week, on September 30, is an introduction for Keaton’s 1926 film BATTLING BUTLER. Visit the library’s events page, select September 30, and then register for one of the two event listings.
Chicago Film Society
The Chicago Film Society currently has four 1980s snipes featuring Chicago radio icon Larry Lujack up on their Vimeo page. A more general set of snipes are also available here.
American Writers Museum
Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco’s 2020 documentary FLANNERY (97 min) is available for rent locally via the AWM here.
Doc Films (University of Chicago)
Doc Films and several campus organizations are hosting a free online screening of Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ 2020 documentary BOYS STATE (109 min) on Sunday at 4pm. RSVP here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter’s 2019 Austrian/German film SPACE DOGS (91 min) is available for streaming beginning this week.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Tom Dolby’s 2019 film THE ARTIST'S WIFE (94 min), Alan Govenar’s 2020 documentary MYTH OF A COLORBLIND FRANCE (86 min), Sarah Colt and Josh Gleason’s 2020 documentary THE DISRUPTED (91 min), and Rémy Anfosso and Jason Matzner’s 2020 documentary A CHEF'S VOYAGE (90 min) are all available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Siskel website for hold-over titles.
Music Box Theatre
Hayden J. Weal’s 2020 film DEAD (90 min) and Youssef Delara’s 2019 film FOSTER BOY (109 min) are available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
Music Box of Horrors
The Music Box Theatre’s annual 24-hour horror film marathon is moving to the drive-in and spreading out over all of October, with at least one film each day. The full schedule and more information are here.
ADDITIONAL ONLINE RECOMMENDATIONS
Milwaukee Underground Film Festival – Program 3
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Film Department – Program 3 is available free September 29 - October 6 here
It's odd and disconcerting that the explicitly political program of this year's Milwaukee Underground Film Festival is also the most hazy and dreamlike. It's a slightly beaten-down and exhausted program, but thankfully it still offers plenty of sparks of hope no matter how difficult they are to see through the smoke. Ignacio Tamarit's ¡PÍFIES! (2016) is the outlier in the program—a bouncy elegy for amateur home movie language and rhythms and surfaces. It's a smart and sympathetic way to begin the show. Alex Morelli's BECOMING (2020) is in turns a hopeful, scary, sad, and ironic documentary about an undocumented border activist becoming a US citizen herself. Local filmmaker Trisha Young's CAPITAL PUNISHMENT (2019) is a smeared and nightmarish fantasy from a young unprotected worker exacting revenge and escaping her compromised life. Mikhail Zheleznikov's REVISION (2020) is a simple, serious, and slight consideration of image-making and meaning-taking in a historical context. Michael Lyons's PORTO LANDSCAPE (2018) is a smoky city portrait. Jona Gerlach's THE PIT (2019) is a strong conceptual and visual piece that uses simple static shots of a mining pit in Montana that are complicated by altering the film strip with the chemicals being mined out of the pit itself. Taylor Yocom's IN PARIS, I TANGO FOR MARIA (TAKE 2) (2019) is a performance piece that serves to educate about a lesser known horrific offence that could not be served by the #meetoo movement (namely Maria Schneider's abuse during the filming of LAST TANGO IN PARIS), while defending and praising the victim. Mike Stoltz's SOMETHING TO TOUCH THAT IS NOT CORRUPTION OR ASHES OR DUST (2020) is a brief and bleak work that offers a flickering contemplation of confinement. It's remarkably simple and stark and every second of it works exceptionally well. Ben Balcom's GARDEN CITY BEAUTIFUL (2019) is somehow utopian and dystopian at the same time. With text adapted from a letter from Milwaukee socialist stalwart Victor L. Berger, commuters head to their jobs and relax while repeating prose about how especially well prepared they and their city are for a present disaster. Stephanie Barber's OH MY HOMELAND (2019) is an example of a "perfect film" (an untouched found footage piece), featuring a tv broadcast of the final performance of famed black female opera star Leontyne Price hitting her final notes and receiving rapturous applause. It's a complicated piece, but it's undeniably emotional and joyful. (2016-20, approx. 76 min total) [Josh B. Mabe]
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The festival is presenting one program per week for six weeks, through October 27. Each program premieres as a livestream at 5pm on Tuesday, and then will be available online for one week (select titles may not be included after the livestream, per filmmaker agreements).
Blake Edwards’ SKIN DEEP (US)
Available to stream on Amazon Prime Video (with subscription) here
Blake Edwards’ seriocomic study of a familiar, dispiriting archetype—the womanizing writer of eminent literary renown, here a bearded Californian named Zach Hutton (John Ritter)—administers a tricky balancing act. SKIN DEEP gladly satirizes its hero’s Pulitzer Prize–abetted entitlement and ridiculous appetites—a gunpoint confrontation, multiple car crashes, and a burned-down house are among the results of his soiled relationships and frequent drunkenness—even as it sincerely evaluates his neuroses and obsessions and the effect they have on the people around him, from his newscaster wife Alex (Alyson Reed) to his beloved bartender Barney (Vincent Gardenia). Part of the success of the movie can be chalked up to Edwards’ stylistic bravado, each scene an exuberant exploration of the possibilities of the widescreen frame. Ritter often affects a state of loose-limbed clumsiness as a result of Zach’s drinking, and Edwards prefers to prolong these comedic endeavors—Zach frantically undressing while his date uses the bathroom, or his messy attempt to open a bottle of champagne while placing a call—by shooting them from a distance with scant cutting. The writer-director also makes ingenious use of offscreen space and sound, most famously in a slapstick passage in which the screen goes black for several minutes save for a pair of glow-in-the-dark condoms. But Edwards’ formal antics are deeply bolstered by the emotional precision and physical daring of Ritter’s performance. During one sequence in which Zach decompresses with a hotel stay, the actor ruthlessly communicates the character’s celebrity privilege through as minor a gesture as his offhand repetition of the phrase “Bungalow 11” whenever Zach telephones the front desk for assistance and identifies his room number. As the movie proceeds from one sudden catastrophe to another, Ritter never loses focus, indulging and lambasting Zach’s childishness at every step. (1989, 101 min) [Danny King]
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
Most independent, alternative, arthouse, grassroots, DIY, and university-based venues and several festivals continue to have suspended operations, are closed, or have 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:
Beverly Arts Center – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Events cancelled/postponed until furtuer notice*
Chicago Film Society – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Chicago Filmmakers – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice*
Comfort Film (at Comfort Station) – Programming cancelled until further notice
Conversations at the Edge (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) – Will be presenting online discussions and screenings in October
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) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Festivals:
Rescheduled with new dates announced:
The Gene Siskel Film Center will present a delayed online edition of the Black Harvest Film Festival from November 6 - 30. Information will be available at the Siskel website, www.siskelfilmcenter.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 until further notice
CINE-LIST: September 25 - October 1, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Tien-Tien Jong, Danny King, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, JB Mabe, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Metzger