Friday, October 11
The most famous and perhaps most effective propaganda film of World War II, with Greer Garson as a suburban British housewife gallantly going about her tasks as her husband (Walter Pidgeon) is called to war. The film (and Garson’s stiff-backed Academy Award-winning performance in particular) has dated very badly; it’s difficult now to see the qualities that wartime audiences found so assuring. William Wyler directed; with Teresa Wright, Richard Ney, Dame May Whitty, and Henry Travers (a sequel, The Miniver Story, was released in 1950). (DK) (Music Box, 4:30)
Adosados
The latest feature from Rolf de Heer, a Dutch-born director who’s worked principally in Australia, is a frequently daring work that exists almost exclusively within the confused and tormented consciousness of its seven-year-old protagonist (astonishingly and on the whole unsentimentally played by Chloe Ferguson). In response to her parents’ rapidly deteriorating marriage, the girl retreats into a silent world and refuses to talk, though she angrily makes drawings the parents, whose voices are muffled and virtually incomprehensible, can’t understand. A work of remarkable emotional intensity and tonal shifts, The Quiet Room is a torrent of words and ideas, of unformed, inarticulate feelings with virtually no release. But that intensity can’t be sustained, and the film begins to seem repetitive. The ending is also a disappointment, at once too conventional and emotionally unbelievable. Yet in spite of its considerable flaws The Quiet Room demands serious attention. (PM) (Music Box, 9:15)
(BS) (Pipers Alley, 9:45)
William Wyler’s 1959 version of the Lew Wallace warhorse–212 minutes of dull, expensive spectacle, and an equally uninspiring Charlton Heston. Of course it was Oscars all around. If you must, bring your lunch. (DK) (Music Box, 1:00)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A witty and enjoyable fictionalized account of the career of Reinhold Schunzel, one of the German film industry’s most successful comedic directors during the 1930s. A Jew whose films were adored by Hitler, Schunzel (played with great gusto by Peter Fitz) continued making films under the Nazis, long after many of his colleagues had fled the country, until his contempt for Hitler became increasingly obvious in his parodies. Writer-director Hans-Christoph Blumenberg includes footage from some of these films, some of it very funny. After fleeing Germany in 1937 Schunzel went to Hollywood, where he failed as a director thanks in part to his arrogance and the perception among his better-known German colleagues that he’d turned a blind eye to Hitler for personal gain. The movie features some terrific performances from the supporting cast, many of whom appear in multiple roles. I was definitely entertained, and the footage from Schunzel’s films left me eager to see more. (RP) (Pipers Alley, 2:45)
Margaret’s Museum
See listing under Sunday, October 13. (Pipers Alley, 5:15)
Microcosmos
See listing under Saturday, October 12. (Pipers Alley, 5:30)
A Hot Roof
See listing under Friday, October 11. (Music Box, 7:00)
Johns
“Queer cinema” is fashionable, and particularly this year, films about young male hustlers in Hollywood. Bruce LaBruce and Rick Castro (Hustler White) and Everett Lewis (Skin and Bone) have an inside knowledge of the gay milieu and enough flair to accurately represent it on-screen. But Scott Silver is an unoriginal imitator cashing in on gay chic. Take a cute actor from a well-known show-business family (David Arquette), a semisordid, semisexy subject (teenage gay prostitution on Santa Monica Boulevard), a love story (the hustler and his girl–of course he’s not really gay; he just does it for the money), and a friendship (between two young hustlers), then add a few mobsters (the kids owe them money), some predictable stock characters (a crazy black dude on coke, a shy and repressed customer, a cool porter at a chic hotel, a homeless man), and a few shreds of a cheap dream (leave this urban hell to work as security guards in the middle of a safe nowhere). When the Arquette character has finally solved all his problems and bought bus tickets to leave town, he decides to turn one last trick. By this point you’ll probably be thinking, “If this trick kills him I’ll scream.” But it’s not worth screaming about. (BR) (Pipers Alley, 7:00)
One More Kiss and He Is Dead!
See listing under Saturday, October 12. (Music Box, 7:15)
In Full Gallop
See listing under Sunday, October 13. (Pipers Alley, 7:30)
Nostalgia for Countryland
One of Dang Nhat Minh’s best films, Nostalgia for Countryland is not another coming-of-age story. Yes, its protagonist, Nham, is a 17-year-old country boy who’s secretly writing poetry while waiting for his army papers and tilling the land with his widowed mother, his smart-ass little sister, and his sister-in-law, Ngu. His big brother is off making money somewhere and rumored to be living with another woman. A subtle intimacy and tension slowly grow between Nham and the lonely Ngu. Then Nham picks up a distant relative at the train station: Quyen, a beautiful 30-year-old who escaped Vietnam and wound up working as an accountant in New York. Of course Nham falls helplessly in love with her, a sentimental and sexual awakening that Dang treats with flair, humor, and tenderness. But the fate of these two people also parallels the fate of Vietnam. Quyen has lost her country, and her sensual rediscovery of the beauty of nature, her nude baths in the river, her enthusiasm for an exquisite puppet show (alone worth the price of the ticket) just underline that loss. She’s no peasant, she doesn’t belong, she upsets the balance. Nham is rooted, even trapped in his own country, but his sense of loss and alienation is no less acute. A dreamer without a boat, he’s condemned to stare at the horizon and to experience furtive and forbidden emotions for his sister-in-law. Sensitively and precisely crafted, Nostalgia for Countryland is a rare jewel of a film. (BR) (Music Box, 9:00)
Autumn Sun
See listing under Saturday, October 12. (Music Box, 9:15)
Goodbye South, Goodbye
For many filmgoers Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cinema is represented by a haunting image from his film Dust in the Wind (1986): a boy and a girl on a motorcycle, cruising the Taiwanese countryside. This was the past of the island, and Hou’s films were exploring the pace of people moving about on foot or on bike. Goodbye South, Goodbye is a turning point, for to fictionalize modern Taiwan Hou has to show his characters using faster, louder, more efficient means of transportation: the film starts on a train and ends up with a long shot of a car that has jumped off the road. The real subject of the film is how this change of pace is affecting people’s lives and intimate feelings and forcing the filmmaker to construct a story differently. The loose narrative follows the wanderings of Kao, a small-time gangster with big dreams, his sidekick Flathead, their girlfriends Ying and Pretzel, and a cast of ill-favored characters, from rural cop to crooked politician, as they try a variety of moneymaking schemes but mostly struggle to find a place of their own in the no-man’s-land that the south of Taiwan has become. We’re treated with splendid, almost meditative shots of the countryside, whose beauty is lost on the protagonists: the land they love is a stagnant backwater of urbanized Taipei–a swamp despoiled by modernization that keeps them trapped. Using small, intimate vignettes–floating moments of daily life–and keeping most of the violence offscreen, concentrating instead on the mystery, the poignant presence of the faces and bodies, Hou offers a splendid version of Taiwanese modernity. (BR) (Pipers Alley, 9:15)
Nerolio
Aurelio Grimaldi’s black-and-white feature offers a fictionalized view of the life of the late poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and his homosexual lifestyle. (Pipers Alley, 9:30)
Tuesday, October 15
The Little Foxes
Lillian Hellman’s play about family intrigue in the postbellum south, slickly mounted by William Wyler (1941). Working with cameraman Gregg Toland (who shot Citizen Kane), Wyler fashioned a deep-focus style that profoundly impressed French theorist Andre Bazin, who thought Wyler was the pioneer of a new school of realism. Bazin was wrong–about Wyler and about realism–but the film is still worth study as an illustration of Bazin’s influential ideas. Considered in itself, the picture has power and superb performances, if not heart or depth. With Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, Teresa Wright, Dan Duryea, and Patricia Collinge. (DK) (Music Box, 4:30)
Sleeping Man
See listing under Saturday, October 12. (Music Box, 6:45)
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Adapting works of literature to the screen is inherently risky. Generally speaking, good books, with their special, fragile universes, should be left alone. But occasionally there’s a curious aberration, a film that not only respects the spirit and integrity of the novel on which it’s based, but also brings something of its own to the screen–and in doing so, carves out its own little niche in the pantheon of cinema. David Rocksavage’s adaptation of Truman Capote’s autobiographical first novel isn’t quite on the level of, say, Steven Soderbergh’s King of the Hill–another adaptation of a coming-of-age story told entirely from a child’s perspective–but it’s still moving and evocative, resonating long after it’s ended. This is all the more remarkable when one considers that its source is one of the great first novels by one of the major figures in 20th-century American literature. Rocksavage’s eyes and ears are well attuned to the mossy, decaying environment and lilting, quixotic utterances of southern aristocracy on the skids, and he gets wonderfully textured performances from Lothaire Bluteau and Anna Thomson as the doomed and debauched siblings 11-year-old Joel Sansom (David Speck) comes to stay with. Paul Ryan’s handsome camera work renders the drama in varying tones of deep green, brown, and ochre that are appropriate for this drama of the swamps. (JK) (Music Box, 7:00)
The Proprietor
Director Ismail Merchant, of the Merchant-Ivory team that specializes in picturesque if vapid adaptations of novels from bygone eras, takes on a contemporary story: Adrienne Mark (Jeanne Moreau, giving her usual strong performance), a celebrated French Jewish novelist living in New York, is suffering from ennui. To recharge her batteries she decides to move back to Paris and deal with some formidable ghosts from the past, including her mother’s persecution during World War II. Several friends and acquaintances have told her she’s changed the way we look at women today, yet to her the world seems an increasingly hostile and incomprehensible place. The premise that an artist can foment profound changes in society only to have those changes leave her confused is a compelling one. One can imagine how this “woman’s film” might have played out in the hands of Cukor or Cassavetes; in Merchant’s hands it’s postcard pretty but bland and plodding, with only occasional forays into camp to recommend it. (JK) (Pipers Alley, 7:00)
Prisoner of the Mountains
See listing under Sunday, October 13. (Pipers Alley, 7:15)
Vaska Easoff
See listing under Saturday, October 12 (Music Box, 9:00)
Lilies
One might suspect that Canadians have a hard time being naughty if John Greyson’s Lilies is any example. Expanded from the director’s theater piece Les fleurettes, the film simultaneously dissects a secret crime, a fraudulent career, and a transcendent love affair between two boys as it moves across space and time, from a penitentiary where an aged bishop is hearing an equally aged prisoner’s confession to events in their shared past during one pivotal boyhood summer at a remote resort in Quebec. The film’s multiple transformations and transitions are characterized by a staginess that repeatedly undermines its cinematic qualities, and there’s an earnestness to the romanticism and a hint of fawning reverence toward the multiethnic cast of beautiful young men that seems out of sync with the intent to create a story that unmasks hypocrisy and its legacy of tragedy. Greyson’s musical Zero Patience also suffered from bouts of staginess, but Lilies doesn’t have its edge. (BS) (Pipers Alley, 9:15)
Little Sister
Dutch director Robert Jan Westdijk’s first film has nothing to do with the Raymond Chandler book of the same name, though coincidentally is does recall Robert Montgomery’s famed experiment in subjective camerawork for another Chandler opus, Lady in the Lake. “Little sister” Daantje’s life–her friends, her parties, her boyfriend, her fashion studies–is beginning to take shape when her older brother Martijn unexpectedly shows up, camcorder on his shoulder, and proceeds to invade every second of her days and nights. Rapidly alienating everyone around her with his intrusive filming and even more intrusive presence, he repels all attempts to get rid of him, carting around old family secrets on Super-8 as leverage. Compared to other entries in the obsessive-guy-with-a-camera genre–from Peeping Tom to Coming Apart to Family Viewing to Benny’s Video–Little Sister is pretty tame. It eschews visual layering and juxtaposed images from different sources in favor of a single unrelenting roving eye. Paradoxically, the act of filming everything in mostly handheld point-of-view shots tends to diffuse the creepy voyeuristic implications of the brother’s project, concentrating our attention on the defensive reactions of the sister. Daantje’s world starts to fall apart–but as much from its own fragility as from the infantile sibling aggression of Martijn’s camera. (RS) (Music Box, 9:15)
Twelfth Night
See listing under Sunday, October 13. (Pipers Alley, 9:30)
Wednesday, October 16
The Second Time
See listing under Sunday, October 13. (Pipers Alley, 6:00)
Trinity and Beyond (The Atomic Bomb Movie)
See listing under Sunday, October 13. (Music Box, 6:00)
All Things Fair
After an extended absence from the cinema, Bo Widerberg (Elvira Madigan) returns to international prominence with this autobiographical World War II-era story about a bright, disaffected young student who boldly undertakes an open affair with his beautiful, neglected 37-year-old English teacher–a setup that may seem preposterous until you find out the woman’s husband is a drunken, inept lingerie salesman. But there isn’t a great deal to get worked up about. The cinematography is drab and virtually colorless, and Widerberg’s visual patterns and editing rhythms are wholly conventional. The pacing is sluggish, and the thin material can’t support the two-hour-and-ten-minute running time. Still, the period detail is impressive, and Widerberg remains a highly accomplished director of actors, coaxing a lot of natural, unmannered work from a diverse range of performers, including his own son, who plays the boy. Strongest is Marika Lagercrantz as the schoolteacher, with her plaintive eyes and tell-all face and emotional range. The film is liveliest at the margins, as when the plain, determined young girl who wants to seduce the hero is crushed to discover his attention is elsewhere. It’s possible to admire this film–which won a special jury prize at the Berlin film festival–even if one is only rarely engaged. (PM) (Pipers Alley, 6:30)
Different for Girls
See listing under Sunday, October 13. (Music Box, 7:00)
Vertigo
One of the landmarks–not merely of the movies, but of our century’s art. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film extends the theme of Rear Window–the relationship of creator and creation–into the realm of love and sexuality, focusing on an isolated, inspired romantic (James Stewart) who pursues the spirit of a woman (the powerfully carnal Kim Novak). The film’s dynamics of chase, capture, and escape parallel the artist’s struggle with his work; the enraptured gaze of the Stewart character before the phantom he has created parallels the spectator’s position in front of the movie screen. The famous motif of the fall is presented in horizontal rather than vertical space, so that it becomes not a satanic fall from grace, but a modernist fall into the image, into the artwork–a total absorption of the creator by his creation, which in the end is shown as synonymous with death. But a thematic analysis can only scratch the surface of this extraordinarily dense and commanding film, perhaps the most intensely personal movie to emerge from the Hollywood cinema. (DK) A restoration, including the transfer of the original 35-millimeter image to 70-millimeter and a rerecording of sound effects in stereo, will be shown. (McClurg Court, 7:30; Cinema Chicago members only)
Holy Week
See listing under Sunday, October 13. (Pipers Alley, 7:45)
Forgotten Silver
This entertaining made-for-television “mockumentary” by New Zealand director Peter Jackson (Heavenly Creatures) and Costa Botes purports to document the life and work of an early New Zealand auteur named Colin McKenzie, whose decomposing oeuvre suddenly turns up in a garden shed. The elaborate hoax is lent authenticity as international experts ranging from actor Sam Neill to film historian Leonard Maltin to thuggish Miramax topper Harvey Weinstein wax enthusiastic about the discovery. Jackson, who narrates, speaks so authoritatively about McKenzie’s place in film history (crediting him with creating his own film stock out of raw eggs and adding color by crushing a rare “Tahititian berry”) that Forgotten Silver drew hundreds of phone calls from credulous viewers when it aired down under. Featuring numerous in-jokes, a tip of the hat to an imaginary screen comic named Stan the Man, an over-the-top expedition to find the set where McKenzie struggled to shoot his biblical epic Salome, and a clever re-creation of deteoriating nitrate stock, this film lovingly salutes the centenary of cinema even as it satirizes it. On the same program, Annie Griffin’s British short film Was She There. (AS) (Music Box, 8:00)
Looking for Richard
See listing under Sunday, October 13. (Pipers Alley, 9:00)
Sling Blade
Billy Bob Thornton–who collaborated on the scripts of One False Move and A Family Thing and has been appearing in a good many recent pictures (One False Move, Dead Man)–wrote, directed, and stars in this impressive first feature, a Faulknerian parable about a semiretarded misfit from a small southern town emerging from prison 25 years after killing his mother and her lover. Perhaps the most remarkable thing here is Thornton’s nuanced performance, but the film has other rare virtues: all the characters are fully and richly fleshed out (with some unexpected turns by John Ritter and singer Dwight Yoakam), and the story’s construction is carefully measured. Basically it’s a movie about goodness, which makes it both old-fashioned and unexpected. The secondary cast includes M. Emmet Walsh and Robert Duvall. (JR) (Music Box, 9:00)
Detective Story
Hubris in the precinct house. Sidney Kingsley’s Broadway hit, modeled a little too clearly on Greek tragedy, becomes a solid film d’art under William Wyler’s supple, impersonal direction (1951). With Kirk Douglas as the cop who takes a fall, and Eleanor Parker, William Bendix, Gladys George, Lee Grant, and Joseph Wiseman. (DK) (Music Box, 9:30)
Intimate Relations
See listing under Saturday, October 12. (Pipers Alley, 9:30)
Thursday, October 17
The Westerner
Gregg Toland’s inventive outdoor photography is the chief aesthetic interest of this 1940 comic western, which is otherwise marred by the condescending folksiness of William Wyler’s direction. Walter Brennan dominates the picture as a demented Judge Roy Bean, nicely bridging wit and menace; Gary Cooper is the nominal hero, a rancher who escapes Bean’s clutches by inventing a friendship with the judge’s legendary inamorata, Lily Langtry. With Doris Davenport, Fred Stone, and Chill Wills. (DK) (Music Box, 5:00)
See listing under Wednesday, October 16. (Pipers Alley, 5:45)
To Speak the Unspeakable: The Message of Elie Wiesel
The film opens with Elie Wiesel’s speech at the dedication ceremonies of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It’s boringly familiar territory–with Bill and Hillary looking suitably somber in the front row. Wiesel tells of a woman in the Carpathian Mountains who wondered why the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto didn’t wait quietly for the end of the war. The woman was his mother, and a year later she was dead at Auschwitz, along with the rest of his family. This opening establishes the dichotomy that informs Judit Elek’s understated documentary: banal images in the present, rich verbal evocations of a haunted past. Elek is herself a Holocaust survivor and a pretty mean evocator of the past in her own feature-film career (in Awakening the young heroine’s dead mother appears to her with some regularity). Here Elek follows Wiesel as he retraces 50 years later his nightmarish journey from Transylvania through Auschwitz and Birkenau to Buchenwald. But it isn’t what he sees, says, or does that’s important. The voice-over lines of Wiesel’s writing, well read by William Hurt, are where the true drama unfolds–the inevitable failure of a search for that which is gone. There are few of the usual concentration-camp shots. Instead the dead who’ve taken over Wiesel’s life come vibrantly alive for long, flickering minutes in the silent footage of everyday life in the Jewish shtetl. (RS) (Pipers Alley, 6:00)
See listing under Tuesday, October 15. (Music Box, 7:00)
A Single Spark
Korean cinema is rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with, which is a mixed blessing, as businessmen are now producing more commercial films. But A Single Spark proves that the radical inspiration that was the source of some recent masterpieces hasn’t died, only found new modes of expression. To recount the story of Jeon Tae-il, a young union activist who committed suicide to attract attention to working conditions in Korean sweatshops, director Park Kwang-su raised money through grassroots organizations and thousands of individual donations, and many textile workers agreed to act in the film. A Single Spark interweaves two periods: the last years of Jeon Tae-il’s life (1965-’70), shot in black and white, as he evolves from lost teenager to charismatic activist, and the mid-70s, which marked the apex of the persecution of the left, a time when a writer researching a book on Jeon is hiding from the police. The black-and-white part is the most successful, showing not only the violence done to the workers but their resilience, solidarity, generosity, and solid political common sense–one’s reminded of Soviet or Chinese cinema of the 30s and 40s. The second part is a bit more heavy-handed, but it has to be understood as marking the filmmaker’s (and the audience’s) presence in this historical recounting: the past is not dead, for generations feed one another. (BR) (Music Box, 7:15)
See listing under Monday, October 14 (Pipers Alley, 7:30)
See listing under Tuesday, October 15. (Pipers Alley, 8:00)
See listing under Wednesday, October 16. (Music Box, 9:00)
Sudden Manhattan
Adrienne Shelly first reached international fame as a smart, sassy, tough-as-nails, but slightly confused character in independent classics such as Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth and Trust. When she wrote a semiautobiographical screenplay about the surrealistic and emotional wanderings of a young woman in Manhattan, she auditioned more than 80 actresses for the part before realizing that, no matter how difficult it would be to both act and direct, she was the only one who could pull it off. Sudden Manhattan is a brilliant, ironical, endearing portrait of a complex young woman whose idiosyncrasies and insecurities are matched by the absurdities of life (and male desire) around her: bearded killers, actors with libido trouble, obsessional landlords, fortune tellers. What saves Sudden Manhattan from being merely a female version of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours is the delicate, almost tender, yet goofy humor with which Shelly the director and actor explores the mean streets of her beloved New York. Sudden Manhattan identifies Shelly as a filmmaker to watch. (BR) (Music Box, 9:15)
Swingers
See listing under Friday, October 11. (Pipers Alley, 9:30)
