JIM GABRIEL
We are saddened to report the recent passing of former Cine-File contributor Jim Gabriel. Jim was an invaluable part of both Chicago’s moviegoing community and the broader world of cinephilia that exists online. We will miss Jim’s insight, humor and enthusiasm, and we’re grateful for the time he spent with this site.
“Screenings like this afford opportunities to commune with each other, and with that spirit and body equalized by pain, to love anew the will and wit and sexy, churchy funk of it all,” Jim wrote in his Cine-File review of Prince and Albert Magnoli’s SIGN O’ THE TIMES. “And if that seems overly sentimental, I would submit that a life given over to art that doesn’t contain a measure of sentiment is worth less than nothing; you might as well take up solitaire.” Well said and well lived. (Thank you to contributor Michael Smith for resurfacing this review.)
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Frank Borzage's MAN'S CASTLE (US)
Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm
Lewis Jacobs's influential 1939 survey The Rise of the American Film devotes its final chapter to Hollywood's increasingly topical output in the 1930s. Jacobs advances the thesis that the stark deprivations of the Depression, the civic engagement of the New Deal, and the rise of fascism in Europe had forced the Dream Factory to finally grow up. The New Hollywood ignored the gangster's glamor and sought out the sociological root of his criminality; it condemned mob violence instead of stoking desire for an American Mussolini. Absent in Jacobs's account is MAN'S CASTLE, perhaps the most complete picture of the era and its discontents. The exclusion is understandable: a romance set largely in a New York shantytown, MAN'S CASTLE is the polar opposite of a preachy social tract. Spencer Tracy's Bill is largely content to live as a tramp and listen for the next train whistle. He's no proletariat poster boy. (I know—I once had to conjure a way to make MAN'S CASTLE sound responsible when introducing it during a festival of labor films.) This casual political aloofness is actually the film's greatest strength, and its unique contribution to our understanding of urban life in the 1930s: MAN'S CASTLE simply takes poverty as the norm. It's just something inevitable—a source of shame and embarrassment only if you don't know how to score a free meal or parlay your spare time into kooky odd jobs like serving summonses to showgirls. (A portent of today's gig economy, brought to you by Uber and Task Rabbit?) MAN'S CASTLE is a fairy tale, devoted to equal parts enchantment and moral education. In that sense, it's also the purest expression of its director, Frank Borzage. A career filmmaker who began as an actor in Thomas Ince's silent two-reelers and ended as the director of the Walt Disney Company's three-hour Biblical epic THE BIG FISHERMAN, Borzage worked for every major Hollywood studio. Perhaps that's why Borzage's pair of films for Columbia Pictures, MAN'S CASTLE and NO GREATER GLORY, have historically played second fiddle to Gower Gulch golden boy Frank Capra's comparatively reactionary social fables from the same period. Borzage's films weren't bound up with the house style of a particular studio, in the way that Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor were part and parcel with MGM, or Michael Curtiz exemplified the zippy entertainment of Warner Bros. Instead Borzage was slowly allowed to forge his own style—a spiritual vision, sometimes explicitly Christian, but more often explicitly carnal. Who else but Borzage could direct a scene, as he did in LITTLE MAN, WHAT NOW?, where a man's declaration that he loves his wife could come across so staidly sincere and so unambiguously lewd? Like LITTLE MAN, MAN'S CASTLE is obviously a pre-Code film, free in its sexuality but also downbeat in its assessment of human nature. (One reissue apparently moved the mid-film wedding ceremony to the first reel, to better contextualize the infamous skinny-dipping sequence, morally speaking.) Right when you think you know where MAN'S CASTLE is going, it swerves into new emotional territory. Borzage's concluding show of faith is one of the great revelations of American cinema. Preceded by two shorts recently restored by the Chicago Film Archives: PAYING THE PIPER (1936, 1 min) and VARIETY SHOW AT PEORIA'S PALACE THEATRE (1934, 10 min, 35mm). (1933, 68 min, 35mm) [K.A. Westphal]
Hou Hsiao-Hsien's MILLENNIUM MAMBO (Taiwan)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
After its premiere at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, Hou Hsiao-Hsien cut MILLENNIUM MAMBO by about 15 minutes, excising much of the subplot in which the young heroine, Vicky (Shu Qi), travels to northern Japan on a whim. This passage makes a great impression in the subsequent version, even though—or perhaps because—it seems so fleeting. The heroine registers the change in landscape enough to comment on it in her narration, but she doesn’t internalize it; maybe it’s a result of having felt so transient for so long. In any case, the Japanese visit doesn’t interrupt the film’s hypnotic flow, which is tied to both Vicky’s experience (as a passive, drug-addled raver in turn-of-the-millennium Taipei) and the techno music that drives the soundtrack. Hou’s perspective feels detached in MILLENNIUM MAMBO, despite the fact that he shoots much of the action in medium shot and frequently moves the camera to observe people in motion. That he and screenwriter Chu T’ien-wen have Vicky narrate the story from ten years in the future heightens one’s sense of distance. Adding a layer of mystery to the story, Vicky doesn’t divulge what she’s doing in 2011; one simply gathers that she’s a different person at this point and that she views her young adulthood with feelings of loss. Her experience as a young adult is certainly lamentable: a high school dropout, she moves to Taipei with her boyfriend Hao-Hao to immerse herself in the city’s rave scene. Hao-Hao is often high and abusive, driving Vicky to flee their tiny apartment and take solace with an older gangster named Jack (who may care for her, but doesn’t try to convince her to leave her boyfriend for good). She returns to Hao-Hao a few times, however, drawn to him by some mutual self-annihilating impulse. That impulse provides the film with its dark heart—it’s a movie about the desire to lose yourself and the emotional baggage you still can’t get rid of in the process. (2001, 101 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]
Gabriel Glissant’s LA MACHETTE ET LE MARTEAU (Guadeloupe)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]
If you’ve ever seen the PBS murder mystery series Death in Paradise, you will have seen the island of Guadeloupe, which “plays” the fictional island of Saint-Marie. Despite the Black police officers under the direction of a white Englishman and the majority Black population of the island, there is no hint of the horribly fraught history of this region of the world and why someone like Fidel Castro found fertile ground there for his communist revolution. As suggested by its aptly Soviet title, LA MACHETTE ET LE MARTEAU (“Machete and Hammer”), has some answers. Gabriel Glissant, an Afro-Caribbean actor from Martinique making his one and only film as a director, provides a real-time examination of how Marxist ideology played out in the French department of Guadeloupe when labor union activity resulted in a strike among sugarcane workers in 1975. Among independent farmers, the back-breaking work of chopping, bundling, and loading sugar cane left them, after paying workers and haulers, with zero paydays and no time off to think about working to change their lot in life. Through so-called “self-help groups,” workers came together in a rudimentary collective farming effort to help each other bring in their crops and learn about organizing for change. Glissant films a popular front of unions and intellectuals engaging in membership recruitment and education and marching together on May Day. The problem of Guadeloupe’s two-crop economy—sugar cane and bananas—brings into relief the economic vise in which the population was caught. Of course, tourism is floated as the solution, but revealed as a poor way to stem the exodus of thousands of young people to places with better financial opportunities. LA MACHETTE ET LE MARTEAU can be a bit slow-going when Marxist conversations dominate, but the earnest interest of the Guadeloupean people in trying to banish the abuses of capitalist colonialism is highly engaging. Introduced by Neubauer Assistant Professor of Anthropology Ryan Jobson. Screening as part of ¡Mira! Look, Nuh! Gade! A Caribbean Film Series. (1975, 70 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Penelope Spheeris' WAYNE'S WORLD (US)
Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm
Thirty years on it's pretty hard to write about WAYNE'S WORLD. I was 10 years old and living in Chicagoland, when this came out, and it seemed like it was everywhere. Like Frampton Comes Alive, you were issued it. It came in the mail with packets of Tide. Massively popular, it's still the highest grossing film based on a Saturday Night Live sketch, and at the time, it was only the second one—after the equally Chicago-licious THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980). Somehow, the filmmakers managed to take a sketch that should have only been good in short doses and fill out a feature film without making it seem padded. Unlike the far lesser sequel, which was a rush job patchwork of mini-sketches and set pieces, the original actually had something you could sink your teeth into and a plot to follow. Watching it now, WAYNE'S WORLD operates as a social commentary on the time that I don't think it did then. While on its face this is a simple story of rock'n'roll party dudes just trying to have a good time, WAYNE'S WORLD actually gives a unique commentary on the cultural sea change that was happening when it was made. Bridging the gap between '70s arena rock/'80s Sunset Strip hair metal excess and the coming post-hardcore/alt-rock/grunge revolution of anti-corporate sell out culture, the film asks questions of the value of art in the world of commerce. Unlike a movie like AIRHEADS (1994), a comedy about rockers trying to make it no matter what, you can see the punk leanings of director Spheeris (known for her crucial DECLINE OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION documentary series) come through. Wayne and Garth want to be famous, they want to be rich, but they also know that corporations are evil and in fact out to get you. So much of the film is drenched in the patented bemused irony of Gen X social commentary that you forget it's about Aerosmith and Alice Cooper superfans and not DIY-or-DIE undergrounders taking the piss. The worlds of "Make Money and Get Chicks" hard rock were culturally at odds with the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" revolution that took over fully by the end of the year this film was released. Somehow, WAYNE'S WORLD had a foot in both camps. One of the few films both rockers and punks can get behind equally. It helps that the movie understands that it itself is a cash grab of sorts—an attempt to make big bucks on a small sketch—and it uses the show within the film to comment on this capitalization of irreverent cool. This is a smart movie playing dumb. Or at least having fun and not taking itself too seriously. Even when there are Kierkegaard jokes there's still a kind of self-awareness (that mid-credit rant by Mike Meyers!) that belies the pure goofiness of the film. Some of the jokes are dated but some are ever-fresh. After all, this is the movie that initially gave mass culture "...not!" jokes (thanks, BORAT [2006], for bringing that back) and "that's what she said" (no thanks, The Office, for bringing that back). So as much socio-historical waxing I want to do, let's get real, this is a hilariously fun movie. It's silly. So goddamn silly. And so very Chicago. And hasn't aged much at all. An absolute delight, and one of the very, very few things that makes me feel okay about originally being from the suburbs of Chicago. Co-presented by the Second City Film School. (1992, 95 min, 35mm) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
JP Somersaulter’s DONNA ROSEBUD (US)
Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 7pm
The locally produced black-and-white independent feature DONNA ROSEBUD, which premiered at the Music Box in 1987, recently underwent a digital restoration, so now a whole new generation of Chicagoans can appreciate this bit of indigenous cinema history. Director JP Somersaulter cut his teeth on animation before turning to live action, and one senses his background as a cartoonist not only in DONNA’s fanciful premise, but in the subtly exaggerated mise-en-scene and the entirely non-diegetic soundtrack. The film takes place in an alternate reality where western societies are all matriarchal, death doesn’t exist, and people can freely choose what age they want to be. The title character is something of a model citizen in this world, taking advantage of her unlimited time to pursue simultaneous careers in politics, medicine, music, law, and sports; she’s also a mother of seven (given the heroine’s impossible overachievement, the film bares a passing resemblance to the cult classic THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BONZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION, which was made around the same time). Though Donna suffers from bad dreams—in which she has visions of our dystopian world of patriarchy and death—there isn’t much conflict in the film apart from this. Somersaulter is mostly content to play around in his imaginary environment, fleshing it out with whatever details strike his fancy. There’s a fun subplot about Donna, who serves as Mayor of her city, having to resolve a musicians’ strike that threatens to destabilize society (the fine arts are as essential to the movie’s fictional world as municipal services or the government); this allows the filmmakers to devise at least a few enjoyable visual gags involving a French horn. There’s also an unusual romantic subplot about Donna’s lover, who’s played by multiple actors. Despite all the goofy ideas, DONNA ROSEBUD is a fairly serious film at heart, as it asks viewers to consider what a perfect world might look like. Co-presented by the Chicago Film Archives. Followed by a post-screening Q&A with JP and Lillian Somersaulter and Michael Motes moderated by Cine-File co-managing editor Kat Sachs. (1986, 80 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Sachs]
Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 4pm
Despite its massive popularity and canonization as the classic film, VERTIGO remains one of the most insidious, disturbing movies of all time, particularly as it relates to the tortuous labyrinth of the psyche. Out of all the films in the Hitchcock oeuvre, VERTIGO resonates with the most Freudian overtones. Indeed, there exists a strong thematic thread between the two men: both are essentially concerned with peeling back the facade of normalcy to reveal something perverse lurking underneath. As with psychoanalysis, nothing is as it seems in VERTIGO. The story—about Scottie (James Stewart), a former detective being lured out of retirement to investigate the suspicious activities of Madeleine (Kim Novak), his friend's wife—is a pretense for an exploration into the (male) creation of fantasies, a subject that's integral to how we experience movies on the whole. From the very beginning of the film it's almost as if Scottie is subconsciously aware that Madeleine is an unattainable illusion. When he gazes at her in the flower shop, it feels as if the two are situated in different realms of reality. Even when Scottie and Madeleine are at their most intimate, he's kept at a distance by the enigma of her femininity. It's precisely because of this Delphic quality that Madeleine is elevated to the status of fantasy object after her death. In fact, her death only enhances her desirability, the notion that sex/Eros and death/Thanatos are intimately intertwined being one of Freud's most groundbreaking theories (though partial credit should be given to Sabina Spielrein, as David Cronenberg's A DANGEROUS METHOD suggests). Scottie's transformation of Judy into Madeleine in the second half of the film suggests that male desire hinges on the alignment of fantasy and reality; however, Judy is complicit in her metamorphosis from her true self into a fantasy object, evoking John Berger's supposition that "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at." The famous silhouette shot of Judy in the hotel room emphasizes the bipartite nature of the female psyche—a woman might love you, but she'll simultaneously take part in a nefarious murder plot at your expense. In the end, Judy/Madeleine is anything but a certified copy—she's tainted, corrupt, and cheapened. VERTIGO suggests that one cannot (re)create something that never truly existed in the first place. As Slavoj Zizek puts it: "We have a perfect name for fantasy realized. It's called nightmare." Screening as part of Doc’s Friday series, “Sight & Sound: The Greatest?” (1958, 128 min, 35mm) [Harrison Sherrod]
Giuseppi Patroni Griffi's IDENTIKIT (Italy)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, Midnight
Psychodrama drenched in atmosphere. Madness as sexuality. A purposefully confusing and elliptical film about an equally confusing and elliptical woman. Absolutely everything you need to know is put up on the screen—but in the wrong order. And even though it's all there, it still feels like it's not quite enough. IDENTIKIT finds Elizabeth Taylor at her most honest and messy. We're so lucky that instead of getting her doing campy psycho-biddy films in her older years like so many female movie stars (Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, et al.) we got to see Taylor give an unnerving performance as a woman with a secret desire and deadly personal agency. Based on the novel The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark, this film has been saved from near obscurity almost single-handedly by film writer Kier-La Janisse and her revolutionary, and instantly indispensable, book House of Psychotic Women. Janisse has included the title in a box set tied to her book via Severin Films, giving it a new life and a new context in which to appreciate it. Janisse has done a magnificent job of expanding the boundaries of what horror should be considered by pushing for a much more psychological, and female, idea of fear. Italian exploitation cinema has been almost completely strip-mined at this point, with even the dregs of schlock being held up in a macabre WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S farce of retro-culture re-discovery. Everyone wants to be the person to reclaim a bad film as Actually Good on Film Twitter in a sad masquerade of self-aggrandizement as film criticism. And it's an insult to someone like Janisse. The giallo is exhausted and names like Argento and Fulci have become as commonplace as Craven and Carpenter among casual horror heads. So, to see a film like IDENTIKIT, based on a book sold as a psychological thriller, and one so particularly female, being held up to the level as those films rife with dead women at the hands of black gloved straight razors is wonderful. This movie is frightening in its discomfort. It's taking a seat on a suspiciously empty train car. Having an off-putting encounter with a stranger at the store. You feel like you're watching something happen that shouldn't be happening in public. And that somehow it's watching you back. In a post-slasher, post-torture porn, post-New French Extremity, post-zombie outbreak world, the term horror feels like it's more and more equated with, and used interchangeably, with gore. That horror is a bloody mess. Even when horror goes mainstream in psychological ways, such as SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), there is still always that connection to the gore. Deeply unsettling, confusing, maddening. IDENTIKIT draws you into its world in a way that rare great films do, as both accomplice and witness. It's a wonderful reminder that the term visceral has a double meaning. Screening as part of Mezzanotte at the Music Box, programmed and presented by Stephanie Sack. (1974, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Andrea Pallaoro's MONICA (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
The prodigal return—a theme as old as time—gets a subtle and of-the-moment interpretation in Andrea Palloaro's (MEDEAS, HANNAH) third feature. Monica (Trace Lysette, in a quietly commanding turn) is called back to her rural home town to help care for the terminally ill mother who once put her on a bus out of town, completely rejecting her in lieu of goodbye. It is not the mother, nor the brother she hasn't seen since leaving as a late teen, but the sister-in-law Monica's never met who asks her to come back. The family and town are both crumbling, and her attempts to reengage are at first rejected or met with suspicion. But the longer she stays, the more she knows she needs them as much as they need her. Filmed in a shadow-filled 4:3 ratio, the camera shows either what Monica sees or what someone who's on the couch or in bed with her might. There are few long shots or even ones where we see Monica's entire body. Unlike the more standard widescreen formats used in contemporary cinema, 4:3 privileges human figures over their environments—you can think of it as portrait rather than landscape mode. This formal decision lends the film a palpable intimacy and helps Pallaoro tell what could have been a sentimental or emotionally-front-loaded story with surprising resonance and subtlety. Pains are taken to avoid didacticism and cliché. This is a trans story that never utters the word, which makes the way an estranged family grapples with Monica's identity that much more lived-in. There are so few false notes that a scene where mother, grandchildren, and daughter assemble a jigsaw puzzle of Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory stands apart as a real groaner. It's a rare misstep in a film that centers intelligence, respect, and tolerance when dealing with human differences and long-standing family schisms. It's a point of view glaringly absent but badly needed in this country's conversation with itself. (2022, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]
Jim Henson’s LABYRINTH (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 9:30pm and midnight
LABYRINTH is one of the few movies I can quote from start to finish, given the number of times I watched it as a kid. It’s not hard to see why it was so compelling: a coming-of-age story about a girl with a big imagination who finds herself within the fictional world she dreams about. Add in Jim Henson puppetry and David Bowie and it’s not a hard sell. I still watch this movie often as an adult, and its deeper meaning has become more pronounced. This film both reflected and shaped my understanding of my own girlhood, of fantasy and desire, in ways that I’m still processing. Not as explicitly dark as other '80s coming-of-age fairy tales like RETURN TO OZ or THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, but it still contains themes of the tragic transition of growing up. Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) is a teen more obsessed with escaping into her romantic fantasy world than a social life. When her stepmother and father request that she babysit her baby brother, Toby, Sarah feels completely put upon. Dramatically she calls out to Jareth (David Bowie), the Goblin King, to take the baby away. And to her dismay, he does, stealing away Toby to his castle at the center of a magical labyrinth. Jareth gives Sarah a chance to get him back by solving the labyrinth within 13 hours. Along the way she meets a helpful group of friends as Jareth creates dangerous obstacles. LABYRINTH’s tone is often light and funny, alerting that this may be just a fantasy. But it also takes some stark turns, particularly in respect to Sarah’s struggle to move on from childhood, and her relationship to Jareth, who is both perilously controlling and completely alluring. Bowie’s performance here is dazzling, and he also provides the catchy songs heard throughout the film. The creature designs are memorable, too, so visceral and expressive—the Wiseman, performed by Frank Oz, stands out as one of the most impressive despite only appearing once. There are a lot of reasons LABYRINTH has become a cult classic, but the allowance of Sarah to be a melodramatic teenage girl, to indulge in her fantasies and decide for herself how or when to move beyond them makes the film resonate. Featuring a live shadowcast by the Goblin King Players. (1986, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Felix van Groeningen & Charlotte Vandermeersch’s THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS (Italy/Belgium/France)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
A man and two young boys approach a glacier in the Italian alps, a huge crevasse separating the icy expanse from the mountainous terrain. The man jumps onto the glacier, followed by one of the boys. The other, contending with altitude sickness, struggles. This is the man’s son, Pietro; the other boy is his friend, Bruno, who lives in the secluded region year round. That Pietro’s father and Bruno have in common such a tolerance for the excesses of the natural world is the start of the fissure between the patriarch and his son, which becomes a crevasse in its own right. Their strained relationship finally falls between the cracks during a pivotal moment wherein Pietro tells his father that he’s wasted his life, an assertion spurred by the engineer’s workaholic tendencies. Many years pass, the father dies, and Pietro (played by Luca Marinelli as an adult) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) reconnect in the mountainside where, per Pietro’s father’s wish, they build a house. This house becomes a reconvening point for the two men over the coming years. Bruno stays put, reopening his uncle’s alpeggio, finding a wife in one of Pietro’s friends from Turin, and later having a daughter with her. Pietro is a wanderer, however, traveling the world and returning to the mountainside only in summer. He later likens their dynamic to that of a parable he’s heard among his travels: he’s the man who’s traveled all the eight mountains while Bruno is the one who’s ascended the single mountain at the range’s center. Each approach has its benefits, its drawbacks; where initially it may seem as if Pietro’s wandering is for naught, it becomes clear that this is how he’s found meaning in life, and how he’s come to terms with his relationship with his father. And what may have originally seemed like the definition of freedom—a mountain, all one one’s own, reliant only on one’s self—has become a sort of voluntary imprisonment for Bruno. Ultimately both men contend with a proverbial crevasse, with only the other to understand either a reluctance or inability to leap over it. As a tale of selfhood, the film is remarkably poignant; as a tale of friendship, even more so. It’s also beautiful, shot by Belgian cinematographer Ruben Impens. The only real issue I have with it is the music intended to punctuate passages of time, written and performed by Daniel Norgren. While not necessarily bad, it does evoke 2010s indie-folk rock in a somewhat nauseatingly sentimental way. Marinelli’s elegiac narration of certain parts, however, helps to balance this out. Adapted from Paolo Cognetti’s 2016 novella of the same name by co-directors and partners Felix van Groeningen (THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN, BEAUTIFUL BOY) and Charlotte Vandermeersch (in her directorial debut), THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS is a beautiful examination of the ties that bind us and set us free. (2022, 147 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
Robert Lee King's PSYCHO BEACH PARTY (US)
FACETS Cinema – Thursday, 9pm
Awash in contradictory genre-markers and dripping with corny, playful images, PSYCHO BEACH PARTY casts a nuanced, disturbing, and revisionist look at classic Hollywood production. Chicklet, a painfully virginal teenager desperate to enter an adulthood known to her only through Southern California clichés (necking, surfing, psychoanalysis), finds herself a prime suspect in a string of dismemberments. A killer is stalking the teenagers of her town, picking off anyone who might be abnormal, disfigured, a freak. Of course, Chicklet's sex-crazed, dominatrix alternate persona, Ann Bowman, seems more than capable of murder, but she's not going to let a little thing like 'morbidly psychotic episodes of schizophrenia' (in the words of her would-be boyfriend, Star Cat, played by Buffy the Vampire Slayer alumnus Nicholas Brendon) stand in the way of her going to the end-of-summer luau, and there are plenty of other suspicious people running around: Kanaka, a surf-god who speaks in rhyme and has a problem getting it up; the over-sexed actress Bettina Barnes; the unknowingly gay Yo-Yo and Provoloney, two surfers who happen to really, really like groping each other while being sprayed down with suntan lotion; and Chicklet's mother, a woman with a passion for washing men's underwear and whose obsessive and neurotic behavior threatens the very fabric of domesticity. Within a triple context that simultaneously parodies a 50s psychodrama, a 60s beach movie, and William Castle horror films, these characters move towards their campy doom with hormones raging and shirts unbuttoned. PSYCHO BEACH PARTY began as a brilliant stage play in 1987, written by and starring Charles Busch, who took the role of Chicklet in his trademark drag. For the 2000 film, Busch wrote himself a new role, the chief of police (again in drag), opening the lead for Lauren Ambrose, who inhabits the part as though overdosing on Pop Rocks and Pixy Stix before our very eyes. Busch's screenplay is over packed with puns, intertextual references, and in-jokes, and King's direction skillfully maneuvers through a minefield of potential tonal catastrophes, murdering to dissect traditional narrative devices and shorthands, filling every moment with knowing winks and visual surprises, recognizing that the purest, most brutal form of parody is to take the source material as seriously as gospel. No rear-projection is too fake, no gesture too broad for this film. From its rude but delightful opening credits sequence--nothing but a go-go dancer gyrating faster than seems humanly possible while a voice chants the word 'psycho'--to its multiple endings mirroring Chicklet's multiple personalities, PSYCHO BEACH PARTY works to break the seething subtexts of the films it's skewering free, and succeeds magnificently. This is the genre-bending masterpiece that CABIN IN THE WOODS, with all its tired mechanics and missed opportunities wishes it could be. (2000, 95 min, Digital Projection) [Kian Bergstrom]
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Preceded by FACETS Film Ed Dept Trivia at 7pm, hosted by critic, programmer and Cine-File contributor Raphael Jose Martinez. More info here.
Emanuele Crialese’s L’IMMENSITÀ (Italy)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
If Penélope Cruz is the Sophia Loren of her generation, then this may be her TWO WOMEN—the film that lets her deliver an instantly iconic characterization of motherhood. L’IMMENSITÀ is Emanuele Crialese’s autobiographical drama about a well-to-do family coming apart in 1970s Italy, and Cruz anchors the work as Clara, a wife and mother who withstands an abusive marriage in order to be close to her three kids, whom she loves with heroic might. Crialese honors the children’s perspective most of the time, so the episodes of abuse are limited to the few scenes they witness (those scenes are plenty harrowing, however). Generally, it’s one of those bittersweet celebration of childhood movies that the Italians are especially good at making, with naturalistic scenes of kids playing in groups, kids discovering physical intimacy, and kids rebounding from tragedy. There’s at least one good fantasy sequence too, a musical number where Cruz and the kids ham it up for the camera like all those brats in LICORICE PIZZA. The fantasy sequence specifically belongs to Adri, a preteen who’s first starting to assert his gender identity, and one thing that makes L’IMMENSITÀ distinctive is how it acknowledges the character’s imagination as both a talent and an escape from traumatic situations. Clara is wholly supportive of Adri in his gender affirmation and provides him not only emotional support; she downright spoils him whenever she can. Cruz plays the role like a diva, and this seems fitting, given the towering role Clara plays in Adri’s life. Indeed, the film derives so much of its power from the relationship between mother and son that it could be classified as a love story. (2022, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Frank Perry's MOMMIE DEAREST (US)
Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 9:45pm
Among the general public the rest of Frank Perry's oeuvre pales mightily in comparison to MOMMIE DEAREST, his notorious adaptation of Christina Crawford's memoir. The film's portrait of Joan Crawford, thanks to a no-holds-barred performance/recreation by Faye Dunaway, decades of cable TV repeats and hearsay drag queen re-enactment, has cemented MOMMIE DEAREST's status as a true cult classic. But experiencing it solely as an over-the-top melodrama sells the movie short. Viewed differently, it's actually a vivid and disturbing examination of child abuse, the perils of being a movie star and of being the child of a star. And Perry uses the same cool, clean style as in DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE. His objective camera, usually at some distance from the action, makes Joan's outbursts of aggression and violence that much more unsettling. This apparent neutrality confounds any easy emotional release on the part of the audience, most notably during the infamous "wire hanger" sequence. It's no wonder that the movie has long been experienced as camp; without using humor as a shield, the events onscreen would be much too disturbing to take at face value. Here is a film that cries out for a re-evaluation. But that will have to wait. Presented by Ramona Slick and Rated Q - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema. Enjoy pre-show drinks and a DJ set in the Music Box Lounge at 9pm. (1981, 128 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]
Kelly Reichardt's SHOWING UP (US)
FACETS Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes
Far away from posh corporate fairs and Insta glamor lifestyle-influenced meta-worlds, our globe is dotted with pocket communities of painters, sculptors, and multimedia artists quietly going about the esoteric, sometimes inchoate business of making art day to day. It is one such alcove—set in director Reichardt's home town of Portland, Oregon—that is the focus of her eighth feature. Throughout her 30-year career Reichardt has consistently avoided the peak-valley conventions of traditional narrative film. Her work is often described as quiet, but I think that shortchanges its slow-burn intensity. Just because her characters avoid cliché conflict points doesn't mean they lack passion or anger. In fact, by often underplaying moments that might be treated as cataclysmic in a Hollywood picture, Reichardt imbues real human friction with a much longer echo. She has a knack for staging low-key, seemingly mundane scenes that linger in the mind. Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a frustrated put-upon sculptor is waging stealth passive-aggressive war against Jo (Hong Chau), her more successful, extroverted colleague/landlord/frenemy. She complains about being without hot water to take a shower and cares for the injured pigeon Jo "discovered" in the yard after Lizzy's cat nearly ate it. She watches enviously as Jo gets accolades for her work, takes men home, has parties, and generally lives the embodied, actualized life Lizzy can't even bring herself to dream of. Williams anchors the film with a performance seemingly inspired by the lumpy, not-quite-formed figures Portland artist Cynthia Lahti has provided to stand in for Lizzy's work. Wearing only earth-toned outfits designed not to reveal a thing about the wearer, her hair a mousey brown, Lizzy is a vague peripheral being who nevertheless hints at depths. She's not the typical movie hero and her challenges are not usual movie problems. The thing Reichardt's film nails most precisely is how ill-suited artists are to deal adequately with quotidian problems but how gracefully they can let intractable differences roll off their backs. Mental illness is treated as a possible mark of genius rather than a symptom to be corrected, and baffling behavior of every kind is accepted with bemused humor. The final scene of Jo and Lizzy wandering away from Lizzy's art opening, trying to track the once-injured pigeon who's flown away is graceful, funny, and a little melancholy all at once. A perfect coda to a movie that celebrates the value of detours and left turns. (2022, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING
⚫ Analog Cinema
Joe Dante’s 1968 proto-mash-up/supercut experiment THE MOVIE ORGY (259 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday at 7pm. Email us at editors@cinefile.info for details about the screening location.
⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
“Uneasy Living: Climate Anxiety in Contemporary Artist's Cinema,” featuring Stanya Kahn’s 2020 film NO GO BACKS (34 min, Digital Projection) and Edgar Jorge Baralt’s 2022 film A THOUSAND YEARS AGO (20 min, Digital Projection), screens Thursday, 6pm, followed by a panel discussion on "Climate Change, Eco-Anxiety, and Catastrophe Media" with filmmaker Edgar Jorge Baralt and Northwestern faculty members Zayd Dohrn (Professor; Director, MFA in Writing for Screen and Stage) and Jacob Smith (Professor; Associate Department Chair; Director, Master of Arts in Sound Arts and Industries). Free admission. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Filmmakers (1326 W. Hollywood Ave.)
Jack C. Newell’s 2022 documentary HOW (NOT) TO BUILD A SCHOOL IN HAITI (90 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday at 7pm. Co-presented by the Haitian American Museum of Chicago (HAMOC) in honor of Haitian Heritage Month. More info here.
⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
“Impressions + Ruminations: Films by Edgar Jorge Baralt & Christina C Nguyen” (Total approx. 60 min, Digital and 16mm projection) screens Wednesday, 8pm, with filmmakers in person. Free admission. More info here.
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Danny Lyon’s 1982 film BORN TO FILM (33 min, DCP Digital) and 1975 film LOS NIÑOS ABANDONADOS (63 min, DCP Digital) screen Sunday, 7pm, as part of “The Decisive Moment: Photographers Turned Filmmakers” series. More info here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
The 2023 Asian American Showcase starts Friday and goes through Thursday. View schedule and more information here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Matt Johnson’s 2023 comedy BLACKBERRY (119 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes. More info here.
⚫ Sweet Void Cinema
Find information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its screening and workshop schedule, here.
CINE-LIST: May 19 - May 25, 2023
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Rob Christopher, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Raphael Jose Martinez, Dmitry Samarov, Harrison Sherrod, K.A. Westphal