:: FRIDAY, AUGUST 9 - THURSDAY, AUGUST 15 :: — CINEFILE.info (2024)

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Satyajit Ray x 2

Gene Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Satyajit Ray's PATHER PANCHALI (India)
Sunday, 1pm
Perhaps the most acclaimed Bengali film, Satyajit Ray's first film PATHER PANCHALI has acquired an additional mythic status due to the difficulties of its production. The story of a Brahmin family living in intense poverty, PATHER PANCHALI ("Song of the Little Road") was shot over the course of five years with a cast of non-actors, a crew with almost no film experience, and with Ray in an almost constant struggle to find funding. The film follows the family's children, sister Durga and little brother Apu, who live out the episodes of their childhood in wide-eyed innocence. Together they chase after the candyman and imitate the extravagances of a traveling theater company. The film's atmosphere becomes increasingly claustrophobic, however, and much of this is owed to the cinematography of first-timer Subrata Mitra. As the family struggles to find income, the jungle creeps in on all sides into their decaying rural manor. The images are bleak but profoundly beautiful. Despite his struggles, Ray was desperate not to compromise the film: for the exhilarating sequence when Apu and Durga discover a train, perhaps the film's most famous image, Ray believed he could only shoot in a week-long sliver of spring when the region's white flax flowers were in bloom. PANCHALI has been cited as a considerable influence by later directors such as Terrence Malick, Abbas Kiarostami, and Wes Anderson. (Remember the overhead shot of a baby swinging in its cradle in THE DARJEELING LIMITED? Ripped straight out of Satyajit Ray.) A classic story of loss and renewal in bitter circ*mstances, PATHER PANCHALI remains a landmark of international (and for the matter, independently produced) cinema. Screening as part of the Entrances and Exits series. (1955, 115 min, DCP Digital) [Liam Neff]
---
Satyajit Ray’s THE STRANGER (India/France)
Sunday, 3:45pm
Set almost entirely in the home of an upper-middle-class Kolkata family, Satyajit Ray’s last directorial effort, THE STRANGER, transpires largely in the form of Socratic dialogues on such topics as morality, religion, and social organization. The relative lack of action was likely determined by Ray’s immobility at the time of the film’s making (he had to direct it from beneath an oxygen tent because he was so ill), yet the breadth of the discussions makes the film feel expansive all the same. It’s based on a short story Ray wrote for the children’s magazine Sandesh (which was founded by his grandfather in 1913), and while it may sound odd that something so explicitly philosophical began life as a kids’ story, the film remains true to its origins in its straightforward storytelling and uncynical wonder about life in general. Anila, a wife and mother in her late 30s, receives a letter from a man claiming to be her long-lost uncle Manomohan, who left Bengal to travel the world in 1955 and who hasn’t been in touch with his family in more than two decades; the letter announces his return to Kolkata after 35 years and his request that he be allowed to stay with his niece and her family for a week when he arrives. Anila’s husband suspects this is some kind of scam, but he allows her to welcome the stranger into their house, provided she kicks him out on any sign of foul play. To everyone’s relief, Manomohan turns out to be an eccentric if perfectly polite gentleman who loves nothing more than to regale the people around him with stories of his travels. Not only does he win over Anila’s husband, but he endears himself to her 11-year-old son as well. In the process of re-establishing his place in the family, Manomohan engages the family and their friends with lessons he’s learned from spending time with tribal peoples in India as well as the Americas, inspiring these bourgeois Bengalis to reconsider personal prejudices about traditional versus modern life. It seems not coincidental that 1955, the year of Manomohan’s departure from Bengal, was the same year that Ray premiered his first film, PATHER PANCHALI, which made him a celebrated director worldwide. Indeed, THE STRANGER can be read as a personal statement about Ray’s complicated relationship with Bengali culture as a globally famous artist, reflecting his sage-like status among his fellow Bengalis as well as his internal sense of isolation from his native country as a man of the world. As a final work, this is neither despairing nor optimistic, but rather a grand summation that, characteristic of Ray, encompasses both extremes. Screening as part of the Entrances and Exits series. (1991, 120 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Douglas Sirk's THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW (US)

Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm

Melodrama and nuance aren’t exactly synonymous descriptors. One hears the former with regard to film and assumes magnified scenarios that are intended to elicit a broad range of emotions. Subtlety is nowhere to be found, as is the case with Douglas Sirk’s… well, anything, but here in particular his 1956 film THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW. At least, not upon initial consideration. Beneath the intensified affections in Sirk’s films are truths of humanity not always palatable unless expressed so totally. In THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW, adapted from Ursula Parrott’s novel of the same name and produced by Ross Hunter (who also produced the 1934 adaptation directed by Edward Sloman), toy manufacturer Cliff Groves (Fred MacMurray) begins to feel taken for granted by his family; his wife (Fritz Lang femme fatale Joan Bennett) is overly preoccupied with the children, and the children are preoccupied with their own lives, seeing father mostly as a big dollar sign. So when former employee Norma Vale (Barbara Stanwyck), having transformed from a mousy toy designer into a glamorous clothing designer, shows up at his doorstep, Cliff finds wistful respite in catching up with an old friend. One thing leads to another, and his teenage son begins suspecting the two of having an affair. His girlfriend admonishes him for this, with good arguments to support her position. But viewers have been privy to that which has caused the son’s suspicion, romantic feelings obviously having blossomed (at least for Cliff; Norma admits to always having been in love with him) between the two. Meanwhile Cliff’s wife, Marion, doesn’t suspect a thing—but is it because she’s so taken her husband for granted that she’s blind to his emotional indiscretions or is her trust in him so unwavering that the thought of her husband being any less than the honorable man she married is simply so far-fetched? Is Clifford truly in love with Norma, or is he nostalgic for a time when he had less responsibility? And what is it that Norma wants? Much is made of her being a childless career woman, something everyone, including herself, is convinced has made her life an ultimately unfulfilled one. But perhaps she’s just managed to evade the rut altogether and is lamenting something she isn’t even sure would have brought her happiness to begin with, considering Cliff’s emotional infidelity toward his wife, who’s only doing the thing she’s always been expected to do. (He’s a parent, too. Why, then, has all the responsibility for child rearing fallen to Marion, only for him to resent her for it?) Rather despairingly, it would seem THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW presents the double-edged sword of both traditional and modern American society, pitting housewife against career woman, man unlikely to find true happiness with either, a conundrum posited by Norma in two separate monologues that express the scenario’s inherent contradiction. Sirk had wanted to make the film in color but, when he wasn’t permitted to do so, was still able to have longtime collaborator Russell Metty shoot it. The result is chiaroscuro black-and-white cinematography that underscores the facade of both domestic bliss and wild fantasy with a noir-esque aesthetic that almost makes the pursuit of happiness feel like a crime. Visual metaphors, such as a toy robot that Cliff’s company is producing—representing the automation with which he’s going through life, as well as how society views him, a machine to be wound up at will—and shadows of rain running down Norma’s cheeks as she stoically comes to terms with reality, complement Sirk’s aims, mimicking one’s overall interpretation of the film as being broad (such visual representation may seem obvious) but even more subversive for being so. This was Sirk’s second film with Stanwyck (the first being ALL I DESIRE from 1953) and Stanwyck’s fourth with MacMurray. Both are excellent, Stanwyck as always and McMurray especially so, communicating the uncertainty that underlies not just the film but domestic relationships as a whole. Nuance is conveyed subtlety in elements such as MacMurray’s performance, but in general it’s an illusory lack thereof that is the ultimate distinction. Preceded by Jesse Hibbs’ 1952 short film WORLD’S MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRLS (20 min, 35mm). (1956, 84 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s MABOROSI (Japan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

MABOROSI opens on a dream, although you'd be forgiven for failing to notice or register that fact. The dream in question, one in which a young girl begs her grandmother to come home as the old woman insists on returning to her birthplace to die in peace, shares the same stultifying visual language as the rest of the film: static master takes with sparse action, interior compositions that are rendered to the outer limits of legibility by a dogmatic commitment to natural lighting, discrete snapshots of quotidian life that often forsake continuity of action in favor of free-associative cuts and punctuating fades-to-black. The dream is Yumiko's (Makiko Esumi), and although her husband Ikuo (Tadanobu Asano) consoles her and encourages her not to dwell on it, monumental tragedy will soon fall, forcing her to grapple with bereavement and the horror of living in the enormous shadow of a loved one. MABOROSI is a stock-still and spectral tone poem about death and absence; it is one woman's moonlit sonata of the heart. The action unfolds as a series of vaporous mirages, almost as though Hirokazu Kore-eda turned his camera on the film's quiet city streets and windswept natural vistas and recorded the dreams of the landscapes themselves and the forlorn figures conjured into being therein. Desolate images flicker to life amidst the quietude: funeral processions traipsing across rocky beaches, young children playing in the snow, old women setting out to sea on rowboats at the first light of dawn. One gets the impression watching MABOROSI that Kore-eda set out to film ghosts with a documentarian's eye and succeeded, capturing fleeting glimpses of those who most go on living after death. With its crepuscular intensity and eerie stillness, the film often registers as a horror movie, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the dim-lit and soft-focus horror phantasmagorias that Kiyoshi Kurosawa was producing contemporaneously. And yet in spite of its ghostly tenor, the film emerges as a profoundly humanistic depiction of a woman's perseverance in the face of senseless devastation, or as Kore-eda himself put it, "a document of light and shadows which flicker inside of a woman." Screening as part of the Chicago International Film Festival Presents: Before They Were Big series. (1995, 110 min, 35mm) [David Whitehouse]

Sidney Lumet's RUNNING ON EMPTY (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 3pm and Wednesday, 6pm

Sidney Lumet was a prolific and consistent enough director that even some of his most well-known films feel minor by virtue of being crowded out by other major work. RUNNING ON EMPTY is one such film, nominated for two Oscars yet rarely mentioned alongside Lumet’s consensus favorites like 12 ANGRY MEN or DOG DAY AFTERNOON. This may be due to its lack of a leading, powerhouse performance (a Lumet specialty), or its relatively unfashionable (for its time in 1988) exploration of the ethics of anti-government action. But like the best Lumet, the film expertly blends exploration of process with personal drama to consider the American soul. Danny (River Phoenix), a high school senior living underground with his terrorist runaway parents (Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti) and younger brother, is a typical teen movie protagonist in unusual circ*mstances. He struggles with young love and deciding what to do with his future, but with the dire stakes of possibly sending his parents to prison looming over him. With Lumet’s sociological eye, this tale of a teen’s struggle against conformity doubles as an obituary for Vietnam-era activism, with whatever remains of its idealism dying out or curdling into violent greed. The political text of the film relies almost solely on Hirsch and Lahti’s scenes, and it sings because of the world-weary magnetism that both actors can bring in their sleep. The performances are understated by Lumet standards but cover familiar ground in his filmography, involving professional expertise deployed towards deception and shifting social identity. The main difference is that these mostly apply to the minor acts of daily living: going to school, getting a job, buying groceries and clothes. They’re stuck living off of scraps in obscurity, making incremental steps toward change which by design can’t matter, because to matter is to be compromised. These are actors playing people acting, who by design can’t employ the histrionics of a Connery or Pacino and who lose sight of their true selves under shifting identities and a directionless commitment to principle. Phoenix’s character treads simpler ground despite the context, with his budding romance with Lorna (Martha Plimpton) checking every box of the broody-meets-eccentric teen love story. Fortunately, both performances are so charming that it doesn’t matter. Phoenix’s (very believable!) prodigious piano playing is a highlight, and it’s Plimpton’s jagged yet tender embrace of Phoenix that gives the film some of its most purely sweet moments. The others come from the domestic scenes, with everyone sharing in sweet borne-of-necessity traditions like anonymous birthday cakes and dumpster-dove dinners, showing a natural rhythm and warmth among the characters that might make you wish that you, too, had grown up in a family on the lam. Screening as part of the Sidney Lumet Centennial series. (1988, 116 min, 35mm) [Maxwell Courtright]

Jerry Blumenthal & Gordon Quinn’s GOLUB: LATE WORKS ARE THE CATASTROPHES (US/Documentary) & Teena Webb’s VIVA LA CAUSA (US/Documentary)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 6pm

Before Kartemquin Films (KTQ) broke the mold with HOOP DREAMS (1994), the Chicago documentary production company had already built a sophisticated repertoire of verité films spanning three decades and covering myriad social issues including labor, gentrification, art and democracy, race, aging, and gender. My favorite KTQ film remains the idiosyncratic GOLUB (1988), a film about controversial American painter Leon Golub created by KTQ founder Gordon Quinn and co-leader Jerry Blumenthal with filmmaker Judy Hoffman in the years between KTQ’s identity as a ’70s collective, ’80s work-for-hire on industrials and educational films, and its ongoing tenure as a social-issue doc powerhouse. Early KTQ filmmakers had generally balked at the bourgeois label “artist,” but Blumenthal was nonetheless drawn to the art world, having developed a number of projects that dealt with the real concerns and ambiguous allegiances of contemporary artists. Operating somewhere between a burgeoning cultural industry and a politic of the streets, KTQ found inspiration in Leon Golub, a fellow Chicagoan who represented the possibility of high-caliber artistic production while remaining politically engaged. GOLUB follows the famous painter through the daily motions of a placid yet charged studio life, travels with him to a Troubles-shaken Northern Ireland for a two-person exhibition with his wife and studio partner Nancy Spero (a renowned painter in her own right), and frames interviews with gallery attendees and a gallery director. Revisiting the film subject just over a decade later, Quinn and Blumenthal spent time with an aged Golub in 2001 to produce an addendum to their earlier film and ultimately re-edit a singular long cut story as GOLUB: LATE WORKS ARE THE CATASTROPHES (2004, 80 min, Digital Projection). They document Golub’s large-scale painting process as he scars and blots the faces of his characteristically awkward figures, flattened into postures of ambient menace and matter-of-fact fascism in scenes of torture, strife, and aggression. Golub’s file collection of photographic grotesqueries indirectly mirrors the film’s interstitials of appropriated news media footage. Captured by Hoffman on film from off-air VHS tape recordings, the images snapshot US-sponsored violence overseas in Vietnam, Central America, Africa, and elsewhere. Roll bars and frame rate discrepancies layer to remind me that images once proliferated at a rapid speed that was perhaps just lagged enough for cultural production (as painting or as documentary) to possibly apprehend. Artist and filmmaker grapple along differing lines as Blumenthal raises the documentary to a self-reflexive level in this later edit. A conversation about political imperatives between the filmmaker and Golub brings the two back to an energetic debate on the cutting room floor of the original GOLUB, in which the painter felt that a final montage suggestively and wrongly positioned him as a direct inspiration to freedom fighters. With old age candor, Golub is confidently and lovingly at odds with the filmmaker (with whom he had regularly stayed in touch), and artistically given over to free associative compositions of friendly perversion, tongue-in-cheek collage, and a fragmentary letting go. I could pluck from a cornucopia of quips by the eminently quotable artist, but I’ll offer a small one that is scrawled into a crude, late work, a catastrophe that reads “Vote Satyr.” GOLUB: LATE WORKS ARE THE CATASTROPHES will be preceded by an earlier, lesser-known KTQ film about the creation of a painting: VIVA LA CAUSA (1974, 11 min, Digital Projection). Not unlike neighboring (and neighborhood) short films in the KTQ filmography—​namely, NOW WE LIVE ON CLIFTON (1974) and WINNIE WRIGHT, AGE 11 (1974)—​the documentary captures the texture of 1970s Chicago exquisitely, this time centering on Pilsen and its now-signature murals, including paintings on the Casa Aztlan community center. Teena Webb’s lens focuses on the renowned Chicano muralist Ray Patlán, who passed away in April of this year. VIVA LA CAUSA is a simple meditation on Patlán’s art-making with local children and the beauty of this unselfconscious process. Local voices interweave to discuss revolutionary history and struggle, cultural preservation, and immigrant solidarity. [Elise Schierbeek]
---
“Artivism: Can Art Bring Us to Action?” kicks off the new “Vital Conversations” screening series organized by FACETS and Kartemquin Films. Other screenings and events include Filmmakers on the DNC: From ‘68 to Now, featuring a conversation between filmmakers Gordon Quinn and Andrew Davis moderated by Rich Moskal, former head of the Chicago Film Office, on Friday at 7pm; a special free screening of the new docuseries Hard to Swallow on Saturday, 1pm, followed by an invite-only KTQ Lab feedback session at 2:30pm; and an Artivism Panel on Sunday at 2pm, followed by a reception. More info here.

Věra Chytilová’s SOMETHING DIFFERENT (Czechoslovakia)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 6pm

See Also

Full Programme World Congress of Philosophy Rome 2024 - Talk: "The Covenantal, The Messianic and The Consciousness in Between: A Modernist Challenge in Jewish Political Theology"

Where Věra Chytilová’s DAISIES is feminist anarchy writ large, her first feature film, SOMETHING DIFFERENT, is more constrained in its depiction of two women and their divergent but still parallel lives in communist Czechoslovakia. I’d go so far as to say it’s dispiriting, though in a way that’s still satisfying as a work of art. The women never interact; the only apparent connection between them occurs at the beginning, when one of the two women, real-life gymnast Eva Bosáková, can be seen on the screen of the television of the other woman, Vera (Vera Uzelacová), a stay-at-home mom. From there a stark divide is made. The parts with Eva primarily show her training. She’s clearly a more liberated woman, putting her vocation before her personal life (though her husband is one of her coaches and thus still exerts some level of control). Despite what she’s achieved—in real life Bosáková was a decorated gymnast—it’s suggested that she’s sacrificed other pleasures that might have also provided fulfillment. She's childless, yet whether or not she wants to have kids is never broached, ambiguously both a suggestion and a declaration. By contrast Vera seems to have nothing but her family, an inattentive husband and a rambunctious son. She soon begins an affair, which ultimately proves insufficient for the existential malaise she’s experiencing. The women’s lives are different, but the pressure they face, a stand-in for the general tyranny over women both worldwide and in the Soviet Bloc, is similar as they consider what they’ve sacrificed for their apparently desired lots in life. The film suggests a sense of futility, that one may get what they want but still not be happy with it—or that maybe it was never wanted at all. In terms of feminist thinking, it addresses the limited opportunities afforded to women; where Chytilová is especially subversive is in including Eva, an accomplished woman who’s nevertheless looking for “something different.” The power of juxtaposition and correlation is rendered formally. There doesn’t seem to be a concerted logic to the cutting between the two stories, a contrast to the rigidity of its subjects’ lives. Some shots stand on their own as beautiful compositions, mostly those of Eva as she’s practicing. In this way Chytilová both captures an illusion of reality (much writing on SOMETHING DIFFERENT refer to the parts with Eva as being quasi-documentary in style) and exhibits an artfulness with form that she would further develop throughout her career. The film, an early entry into Czech New Wave, established Chytilová as a powerful voice with a specific interest in telling women’s stories through curious means. (1963, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
---
Věra Chytilová’s 2006 film PLEASANT MOMENTS (113 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 8pm; both films are part of the Entrances and Exits series.

Summer of 70mm

Music Box Theatre – See below for showtimes

Jacques Tati's PLAYTIME (France)
Friday, 6:45pm and Saturday, 11:30am
Jacques Tati's psycho-geographical treatise par excellence, PLAYTIME, begins in a pedagogical mode: for the first hour, working entirely in and around a multimillion-dollar parody of contemporary skyscrapers constructed in the outskirts of Paris, he teaches the viewer a new way to watch a film. The primary use of long shots and deep focus suggests a Bazinian spectatorial freedom, but the meticulously dubbed, panlingual audio is constantly in close-up: from the cacophony of American tourists to the analog buzzing of an office intercom, from the crash of Mr. Hulot's umbrella to the comic deformation of a squeaky leather chair. By the time we reach a long sequence set outside an apartment with soundproof glass, we have learned that the ear can lead the eye as often as the reverse. And none too soon, for the next 40 minutes--detailing the opening night of the posh "Royal Garden" restaurant and its progressively chaotic, visually and aurally exhausting demolition at the unconscious hands of a repressed, consuming tourist society--is what Jonathan Rosenbaum calls "one of the most staggering accomplishments on film." Here, Tati inscribes an intricate, painterly progression on his enormous canvas: from a restrictive, rigid grammar of straight lines and orthogonal angles to the continuous sweeps of French curves, expressed most directly in the movement of his characters' bodies--progressively intoxicated and compelled not just by alcohol and the increasingly frantic music but by an inevitable collective camaraderie--as they travel through an overplanned and overheating environment that, in a series of destructive sight gags, has lost its organizational power to constrain human desire. Once a disastrous critical flop, PLAYTIME is an odd and striking masterpiece of urban studies that absolutely must be seen on the big screen. (1967, 124 min, 70mm) [Michael Castelle]
---
Walter Hill's STREETS OF FIRE (US)
Friday, 10pm and Sunday, 8:30pm
When asked to explain what inspired STREETS OF FIRE—a big-budget action fantasy that failed to realize its blockbuster ambitions in the summer of 1984—co-writer/director Walter Hill (born 1942) said that he wanted to make what his teenaged self would have considered a perfect movie. STREETS OF FIRE would contain everything that was “great then and which I still have great affection for: custom cars, kissing in the rain, neon, trains in the night, high-speed pursuit, rumbles, rock stars, motorcycles, jokes in tough situations, leather jackets and questions of honor.” With this explanation, Hill summarizes both the film’s strengths and limitations: It was conceived as a collection of brilliantly stylized moments and things, not as a story with characters and a plot. The story is a basic rescue mission tale—a mercenary hero (Michael Paré) must rescue his rock singer ex-girlfriend (Diane Lane, 18 years old and clearly too young for the part) from a biker gang headed by Willem Dafoe—fleshed out with lots of action sequences, theatrical rock numbers (with original songs by Jim Steinman), and a good supporting cast that features Rick Moranis (cast against type as Lane’s cynical manager), Bill Paxton, Lee Ving, and Amy Madigan as a Hawksian female sidekick. What impresses most is the visual design: STREETS OF FIRE takes place in an imaginary city that’s a cross between 1950s Chicago and near-future Los Angeles, and the filmmakers have a good time realizing this city in all its particulars. The film’s premise that, in this world, rock bands are sort of like street gangs (and vice-versa) echoes Sam Shepard’s 1972 play The Tooth of Crime, but don’t expect anything like Shepard’s opaque mysteriousness—this is mostly superficial fun. STREETS may be the closest American equivalent to the “Cinéma du look” that was coming out of France around the same time (Jean-Jacques Beineix’s DIVA and THE MOON IN THE GUTTER, Luc Besson’s SUBWAY), not only in its overall approach to cinematic spectacle, but in its fetishistic use of music and neon. Maybe this would have been more successful if it had been marketed as an art movie? (1984, 93 min, 70mm) [Ben Sachs]
---
John Ford's THE SEARCHERS (US)
Saturday, 4:45pm and Sunday, 5:15pm
The greatest western ever made is also arguably the greatest American movie ever made. Before filming began, director John Ford described THE SEARCHERS as "a kind of psychological epic" and indeed his complex take on the settling of the West, with its head-on—and daringly ahead-of-the-time—examination of racism, finds an appropriately complex and tragic anti-hero in the character of the mysterious Ethan Edwards (John Wayne in his best and most nuanced performance). Spurred on by an unrequited love for his deceased sister-in-law (Dorothy Jordan), the maniacal, Indian-hating Edwards will stop at nothing to recapture his nieces who have been kidnapped by Comanche Indians. "We'll find 'em," Ethan says in one of many memorable lines of dialogue written by Frank S. Nugent but worthy of Herman Melville, "just as sure as the turning of the earth." The dialectic between civilization and barbarism posited by Ford, with Ethan standing in a metaphorical doorway between them, would have an incalculable effect on subsequent generations of filmmakers—from Martin Scorsese to misguided Ford-hater Quentin Tarantino. If you've never seen THE SEARCHERS, or if you've only seen it on home video, you owe it to yourself to catch it projected on 35mm: both the breathtaking Monument Valley vistas and the minute details of the film's production design (e.g., the "Confederate States of America" logo on Ethan's belt buckle), gloriously captured by Winton Hoch's splendiferous VistaVision cinematography, only really come through on the biggest of big screens. Screening as part of the Summer of 70mm series. (1956, 119 min, 70mm) [Michael Glover Smith]
---
Alfred Hitchco*ck's NORTH BY NORTHWEST (US)
Saturday, 8pm and Sunday, 1:30pm
An urbane gentleman is pursued by a sinister organization headed by a cultured villain while simultaneously shadowed by a gorgeous female spy. That's the basic setup for NORTH BY NORTHWEST—and a sizable portion of the James Bond series. What's under-acknowledged is that Hitchco*ck, and specifically this masterpiece of playful paranoia, 1950s style, has acted as a lasting and flexible template for 007's cinematic adventures. James Mason's ultramodern, mountaintop house, as imagined by production designer Robert Boyle, uncannily anticipates many of the fantastic evil lairs designed by Ken Adam for Bond villains (especially Goldfinger). And doesn't the film's famous closing scene remind you of many 007 double-entendre finales? But where NORTH BY NORTHWEST moves into deeper territory is on the question of identity. Not only is no one else who you thought they were, but you yourself are not who you thought you were. Yet in Hitchco*ck's hands such a weighty existential theme sounds like the best time a guy could have. (1959, 131 min, 70mm) [Rob Christopher]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Konrad Wolf and Wolfgang Kohlhaase’s SOLO SUNNY (East Germany)

Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 N. Michigan Ave., #420) – Thursday, 6pm [Free Admission]

It’s not often that we get a chance to screen films from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), aka East Germany, so it is with some excitement and no small gratitude we have a chance to see SOLO SUNNY, co-directed and co-written by Konrad Wolf, East Germany’s most lauded director whose 1959 film STERNE won the Special Jury Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. SOLO SUNNY was a blockbuster hit in East Germany, playing to sold-out houses for 19 weeks at the Kino International theater in East Berlin. The film won a slew of awards, including Best Actress for star Renate Krößner at the 30th Berlin International Film Festival and the Chicago International Film Festival’s Best Script Golden Plaque for Wolf and Wolfgang Kohlhaase, East Germany’s most important screenwriter. Why did this story of a singer with a second-rate, traveling cabaret resonate so deeply for so many? I’d guess that Krößner’s mesmerizing performance as Ingrid “Sunny” Sommer, a young woman determined to succeed in the face of the everyday indignities of life in a sexist, repressive, petty society gave voice to the frustrations of young Germans with little to which to aspire. Sunny lives in a rundown Berlin tenement with a snoopy landlady who disapproves of her one-night stands, music, and apartment hygiene habits and reports her. Sunny’s interview with a government official about the complaint probably had special resonance for a rightly paranoid German audience. (Interestingly, Wolf’s brother was a high-ranking member of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police.) Her work life is no less aggravating. Members of The Tornadoes, the troupe’s band, hit on her incessantly, the horribly unfunny emcee of the show insults her in front of their audiences, and the other female singer in the troupe ignores a harrowing attempted rape on Sunny in their dressing room because she wants to get some sleep. Hoping to find someone she can count on, Sunny falls for Ralph (Alexander Lang) a “certified philosopher” who subs in on saxophone when the regular player is punched in the mouth by the boyfriend of a woman he tried to pick up. Of course, Ralph cheats on Sunny, resulting in a very interesting incident in his bed. Cinematographer Eberhard Geick captures the depressing air of the GDR, with its crumbling walls and peeling paint. Whether by lucky happenstance or foreknowledge, he captures the felling of an apartment block like the one in which Sunny lives and emphasizes the Soviet remake of the city by shooting the cityscape’s empty lots interspersing the characterless apartment blocks going up throughout Berlin. Editor Evelyn Carow pieces together an episodic film, emphasizing the directionlessness of life in the GDR. By contrast, long takes of Sunny’s face center her as the vital heartbeat of the film. Despite disappointments and setbacks, including being dropped by the troupe, Sunny gives show business another shot. Her final line, delivered to an underground punk band she approaches for a job, speaks the in-your-face defiance of a disaffected populace: “I’m blunt, I sleep with whomever I want, The Tornadoes fired me. My name is Sunny.” Screening as part of the 70 Years of German Films series. (1980, 109 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Paul Leni & Leo Birinski’s WAXWORKS (Germany/Silent)

Comfort Film at Comfort Station – Wednesday, 8pm

WAXWORKS is much more than an anthology of horror-adjacent carnival yarns. It’s an omnibus of styles and tones, befitting the German director who began his career designing sets for theater and later for such directors as Ernst Lubitsch and E. A. Dupont and whose later films more fully embrace the eldritch style of this one. WAXWORKS, reminiscent of both Robert Wiene’s THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920) and Fritz Lang’s DESTINY (1921), may feel uneven, and it is—it was initially supposed to be four parts, but alas, due to budget, it ended up being just three. Furthermore, as is noted in the booklet essay for Flicker Alley’s 2021 DVD/Blu-ray release of the film, there was a full-length original version that was lost soon after its premiere, the negative having been destroyed in a fire; the surviving version, pieced together from a variety of print sources, is about twenty-five minutes shorter that the original. Still, what there is of it has earned such distinctions as “one of the most unique and important films of its time.” It was also the last Leni made in Germany before migrating to Hollywood, this being the film that earned him an invitation from Carl Laemmle to work at Universal; it’s a fitting send-off, a survey of the cinematic milieu he helped to further distinguish. It was written by Henrik Galeen, who wrote the script for NOSFERATU, here again igniting another enduring horror subgenre (although anything related to wax is a little more niche than vampires). Framing the triptych is the story of a young poet (played by future director William Dieterle) who responds to a wanted ad placed by a fun fair proprietor looking for a writer to compose the backstories of his wax figures. As the poet crafts the stories, he and the proprietor’s daughter are inserted to them as they play out on screen. The first and the longest features Emil Jannings as the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, who seduces a lowly baker’s beautiful wife, the poet and proprietor’s daughter appearing as the young couple. Leni embraces the differences in settings and time period across the three stories. The mise-en-scene of each is rendered in the German expressionist style but nevertheless evocative of the thread’s discrete characteristics. The second story centers on Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt, who later appeared in Leni’s seminal THE MAN WHO LAUGHS [1928]), who has a proclivity for poisoning and slowly torturing his enemies. Ultimately it’s himself who he tortures the most, that descent into madness a hallmark of such films. Lastly is spring-heeled Jack (Werner Krauss), a stand-in for Jack the Ripper. This sequence is the most hallucinatory, literally—it directly involves the poet and proprietor’s daughter seeming to dream what’s happening as the murderer stalks them—and figuratively as it perhaps most fully represents the limitless aesthetic possibilities afforded by expressionism. Often regarded as the last of the German expressionist films, its impact was so significant as to have an influence on Sergei Eisenstein’s 1945 film IVAN THE TERRIBLE. If the appeal of wax-related narratives are that it enables almost realized forms to come fully to life, it makes sense that Leni excels in this genre. Screening as part of the Silent Films on the Lawn series, in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Chicago and with live accompaniment by Echo Haus. (1924, 107 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]

Nicholas Ray's (and Ida Lupino's) ON DANGEROUS GROUND (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 8pm

Nicholas Ray showed his greatest sympathy for outcasts, misfits, and the mentally unbalanced—in other words, for the damaged souls for whom it’s difficult, if not impossible, to function in normal society. One of the many riches of ON DANGEROUS GROUND is that here the Ray hero is a police officer, which raises multiple fascinating questions about America’s obsession with law and order. Cop Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan at his best) can barely repress his hatred for the criminals he takes in; early on in the movie, he even gets reprimanded by his Captain for being too rough with suspects. Yet it’s clear that Jim is also a terminally isolated person whose brutality masks a deep yearning to be loved. What is it about law enforcement that attracts people like Jim? Moreover, does society need people like Jim to do its dirty work? The first half-hour of ON DANGEROUS GROUND meditates on these questions while delivering an engrossing character study and a decent policier to boot. Jim and his partners join the search for two men who killed a couple of officers, and Ray (working from a script he co-wrote with A.I. Bezzerides) presents the police work matter-of-factly, emphasizing the tedium and thankless work that are part of any widespread investigation. The city where Jim works goes unnamed, and this anonymous quality, coupled with all the quotidian detail, adds to our sense of the hero’s alienation. Ray introduces Jim in a pithy yet revealing sequence that shows his partners saying goodbye to their families as they leave for the night shift, then cuts to Jim eating dinner alone. These shots set up a divide between Jim and other people that expands as the investigation goes on. Jim catches the killers, but only after creating a rift with his partners and getting his superiors in hot water. To get him out of the way of a PR fracas, the Captain sends Jim 70 miles upstate to assist with a small town’s search for a runaway child killer. The change in setting from urban (flat, brightly lit) to rural (mountainous, snowy) happens in seconds, and the resulting sense of physical displacement feels in keeping with the general portrait of spiritual displacement. (It’s one of the movie’s finest poetic flourishes.) No sooner than Jim arrives does he meet the victim’s father (Ward Bond), who’s so bent on revenge—he vows to shoot down the killer if he finds him before the police do—that he makes Jim’s bloodlust seem tame by comparison. Jim recognizes this, in the first of several epiphanies that occur during his time in the country. The next few arise during the time he spends with the killer’s sister, a blind woman who lives outside of town and who puts Jim up for the night when his car gets damaged during a snowstorm. Ida Lupino plays the sister and directed parts of the film when Ray became too sick to work; her onscreen interactions with Ryan are some of the most poignant in either Ray's or Lupino's filmography. The characters’ growing comfort with each other stems largely from their mutual feelings of loneliness; this comfort gives way to what Doc programmer Kathleen Geier describes as “a luminous Borzagean drama about the spiritually redemptive power of romantic love.” Howard Hughes, then head of RKO Pictures, demanded that Ray change ON DANGEROUS GROUND’s downbeat ending (he also cut the film by ten minutes), and it’s possible that he made the right call. The evolution from despairing crime drama to optimistic love story is one of the most sublime and satisfying narrative arcs in American cinema. Screening as part of Nicholas Ray’s Heyday series. (1951, 82 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Raoul Walsh’s THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 5pm

It is a real pleasure to talk about THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE, one of the most charming films ever made. The deliriously happy marriage of a cast oozing with chemistry and giving pitch-perfect performances, delicate direction even during more melodramatic moments, a mise-en-scène that is at once nostalgic and riotously lively, and some home truths in a smart script adapted by Julius and Philip Epstein from the play “One Sunday Afternoon” by James Hagan make for a very uncomplicated good time. Cagney is at his affectionate best playing Biff Grimes, a scrappy young man trying to find his way in the world at the turn of the 20th century. He takes one correspondence course after another, landing and losing jobs in a single day, and mooning along with half the town’s eligible young men after lovely strawberry blonde Virginia Brush, played with coquettish allure by Rita Hayworth. Biff’s friend Hugo Barnstead (Jack Carson) has his eye on Virginia, too, but he’s too much a man of the world to pant at her heels. When he casually sets up a date with her, Virginia insists on bringing a friend. Hugo drags Biff along to play nice with the friend, luring him with the false promise that Virginia is to be his date. This will not be the last or most serious lie Hugo tells Biff, but it is one of the luckiest lies Biff will ever hear because he meets Amy Lind (Olivia de Havilland), a nurse and liberated woman he eventually marries. Interestingly, Cagney’s mother formed the impetus for naming the film. As the actor put it in his autobiography, Cagney on Cagney, “It was part of our family legend that when she was about sixteen, she went to a dance with a fella named Eddie Casey. That happened to be the very night the song ‘Casey Would Waltz with the Strawberry Blonde’ was first introduced. Because Mom was a strawberry blonde, she and Casey were inevitably the feature of the evening. So, as a tribute to my mother, we renamed the picture.” The major set-piece of the film is a recreation of that dance during Biff’s only date with Virginia, alive with romance and a comedic set-to in the beer garden where the pair spins to that iconic song. The date sets up Biff’s major heartbreak as Hugo elopes with Virginia not long thereafter. Still, the friends go into a construction business together. Hugo’s shady dealings see Biff, the innocent patsy, end up in prison where he learns dentistry by, yes, correspondence. The film is told in flashback, with an ailing Hugo unwittingly phoning Biff’s dental practice at the beginning of the film, thus building suspense as to whether Biff will get even by giving Hugo a lethal whiff of gas. Hugo and Virginia are greedy social climbers whose transactional relationship makes them both miserable. Amy’s veneer of the independent woman melts swiftly, which always saddens me a bit, but she learns to become as genuine as Biff always has been through her love for him. As he is taken to jail in a gentlemanly fashion by his policeman friends, one look to her and a “Wait for me” communicate to the world about what a touching and carefully modulated film this is. It goes from comedy to tragedy almost in the blink of an eye, but never without proper motivation having been built in beforehand. Great supporting performances by Alan Hale and George Tobias as Biff’s father and friend, respectively, provide strong timber to a structurally tight and true film. Screening as part of the Public Enemy: Cagney on Film series. (1941, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Raoul Walsh’s WHITE HEAT (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 8pm

Both James Cagney and director Raoul Walsh took credit for making Cody Jarrett, the criminal antihero of WHITE HEAT, a mama’s boy as well as a psychopath, and who could blame either of them for wanting it? After Alfred Hitchco*ck’s PSYCHO (1960), this has got to be the last word on mother love in Hollywood cinema. Jarrett can commit murder without batting an eye, yet he still seeks his mother’s embrace whenever he gets one of his debilitating migraines. In light of his infantile behavior, Jarrett’s violent impulses seem as much the product of his arrested emotional development as his ever-present need for maternal affection. The markedly Freudian nature of WHITE HEAT reflects postwar American culture’s interest in psychoanalysis, which inflected everything from westerns to film noir in the decade after WWII. At the same time, the film was seen on first release as a throwback to gangster pictures of the ‘30s, the genre on which Cagney first built his reputation as a movie star. By the time of WHITE HEAT, the actor hadn’t played a gangster in ten years (the last time had been in THE ROARING TWENTIES, also directed by Walsh) and his feelings toward the genre had soured somewhat. He agreed to make the picture reluctantly, then worked with the screenwriters to flesh out the scenario. His effort paid off—the movie remains one of the most popular of Cagney’s career. Regardless of how much he contributed to the central characterization, Walsh deserves much credit for the film’s shocking brutality. The director specialized in rough-and-tumble characters, but few as downright evil as Cody Jarrett; Walsh’s streamlined approach to storytelling makes the violence hit especially hard. Screening as part of the Public Enemy: Cagney on Film series. (1949, 114 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Leslie Harris’ JUST ANOTHER GIRL ON THE I.R.T. (US)

Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Sunday, 1pm [Free Admission]

Leslie Harris’ sole directorial outing has you questioning your own assumptions right from the title screen. Would you describe Chantel Mitchell (a magnetic Ariyan A. Johnson) as just another girl? A fierce and focused character bursting with brains, attitude, and heart, Johnson comes roaring out the gate as both incredibly endearing and remarkably complex. Growing up in Brooklyn, her aspirations of “rising above” her current circ*mstances (both her parents work late hours to support their less-than-ideal lifestyles) to become a doctor instill her with a well-earned confidence that makes her both a social butterfly and a nightmare of a student (good grades only count for so much when she's frequently butting heads with her straight-laced history teacher). As a director and writer, Harris’ innate strengths are in her melding of slice-of-life storytelling with her understanding of the tools of cinema (of note are Chantel’s frequent addresses to the camera, stylish footage capturing the urban beauty of Brooklyn, and the bombastic and energizing hip-hop/R&B soundtrack). Chantel’s dreams come to a head after a steamy night with a new fling leads to a positive pregnancy test that threats to derail the life she’s trying to build, but Harris avoids obvious PSA-style moralizing in favor of strong character work build upon Chantel’s own bodily autonomy and strong-willed agency. Harris’ roaring debut sits firmly alongside the oeuvres of contemporaries like John Singleton and Spike Lee in cementing artistic and socially compelling portrayals of Black American life, though—like​ other Black female filmmakers of the time, like Julie Dash and Cheryl Dunye—​Harris would sadly not receive the same opportunities and career momentum as her male contemporaries (JUST ANOTHER GIRL ON THE I.R.T. and BOYZ N THE HOOD are equally compelling coming-of-age stories, but only John Singleton would go on to direct a FAST & FURIOUS film). Even with such a rude dismissal from the larger Hollywood system, Harris’ work has more than stood the test of time; her film remains equally humorous and harrowing, quick-witted and painfully relatable. Perhaps that’s what Harris was getting at with her title; Chantel really is “just another girl” that we might encounter in our day-to-day lives, and with all her prowess and fear and confidence and hopefulness, she really could be any of us. Screening as part of the Screening Acts series, a free film series celebrating Black independent cinema. (1992, 92 min, Unconfirmed Format) [Ben Kaye]

Pier Paolo Paolini’s THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS (Italy)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 5pm

THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS is probably Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most lighthearted movie, but it’s still explicitly political, and it contains plenty of speechifying as well. That’s because Pasolini assumed his role as a public intellectual with the utmost seriousness; even when he was telling jokes, they had to be about Marxism. The film stars comic legend Totò as a wisecracking tramp who leaves his small town on a whim with his grown son (Ninetto Davoli, Pasolini’s frequent muse), and they set off down a long, seemingly endless road. A Godardian title card informs us that their journey will end before it begins; the journey, it turns out, is to solve the problems of the postwar Italian proletariat. As in Godard’s WEEK-END (which came out around the same time), the picaresque story comprises various allegorical episodes, though Pasolini’s thematic focus is on religion as much as politics. In the film’s longest episode, the heroes meet a talking crow, who speaks to them of two of Saint Francis’ followers in the 13th century tasked with converting the hawks and the sparrows to Christianity. (The sequence is an affectionate parody of Roberto Rossellini’s THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS [1950].) Any similarities between this story and the present day, the crow says, are not coincidental—meaning, organizing leftist movements in post-fascist Italy is like trying to explain Christianity to birds. In the end, the tramp and his son eat the crow for dinner. (1966, 89 min, 16mm) [Ben Sachs]

John Adams and Toby Poser’s HELL HOLE (US/Serbia)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, 11pm

Following the success of their previous independent features HELLBENDER and WHERE THE DEVIL ROAMS, the creative team of John Adams and Toby Poser have conceived a new, hellish world for audiences to enjoy. Wonder Wheel Productions, their family-run studio, includes not only the husband-and-wife duo of Adams and Poser but also their daughters Lulu and Zelda. This filmmaking family is known for their explorations into body horror, witchcraft, and the undead. In their latest production, HELL HOLE, the Adams family has shifted from the somber horrors of their earlier films to brave the tightrope of horror-comedy. Unlike the meta-narrative of SHAUN OF THE DEAD or the zombie rap of DEAD & BREAKFAST, and distinct from the alien-infused UNDEAD, HELL HOLE grounds its horror in realism. The comedic elements arise from an absurdist, deadpan reaction to the events, though with more vitality than the impassive cast of Jim Jarmusch’s THE DEAD DON’T DIE. The story begins in Serbia during the Napoleonic Wars, where a starving troop of soldiers encounters a strange woman who provides them with a horse for sustenance—a gift horse they should have examined more closely. This moment echoes the historical gestures of goodwill that mask darker intentions, leading the horse to become a catalyst for infection. In the present day, the Serbian site has become the focus of an American fracking team led by Emily (Toby Poser), a new age hippy turned Earth driller. Her team, which includes John (John Adams) and several environmentalists, uncovers a body during drilling. The body, alive and infested with a parasite seeking new hosts, recalls classic horror films such as ALIEN and THE THING. As with HELLBENDER, which featured doom metal composed by Zelda Adams and her mother, HELL HOLE boasts a metal soundtrack created by the Adams family. While many elements of the film were created DIY-style by the family, they enlisted acclaimed special effects artist Todd Masters of MasterFX for the monster designs. HELL HOLE is an affectionate homage to the creature feature subgenre, infused with the Adams family's heavy metal sensibilities. It is a viscera-filled, tentacle-waving, and darkly humorous spectacle that blurs the lines between horror and a critique of fracking, welcoming its audience with open arms and a blood-soaked grin. Screening as part of Shudder Showcase, a new, monthly series that serves up new screenings of the horror platform’s most exciting and provocative upcoming titles. (2024, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Tilman Singer’s CUCKOO (US)

Various Theaters – See Venue websites for showtimes

German director Tilman Singer’s sophom*ore feature CUCKOO is most striking in its ability to communicate the phenomenological, how the senses determine and morph our realities. This ability is useful, especially, in a body horror film, which CUCKOO certainly is, but it’s not only that. Also a monster flick and an emotional study of grief and loss, the film constantly takes the viewer back to a bodily experience of how all five senses can be useful and deceiving all at once. Set in the Alps, the story follows teenager Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), who is grappling with the recent loss of her mother. She's moving to a new home with her father (Marton Csokas), his current wife (Jessica Henwick), and her mute half-sister, Alma (Mila Lieu), though she’s terribly unhappy about it, brooding and shoddily planning her escape. Her parents were set up in their modern mountain home by the mysterious Herr König (Dan Stevens, who’s always at his best when he’s playing unhinged) who runs an out-of-date resort nearby. He offers her a job there, and Gretchen is fairly unphased by the odd behavior of some of the guests. She is attacked by a strange woman one night and no one believes her—​Gretchen spends the bulk of the film severely injured. Feeling more and more ostracized by her family, missing her mother, and determined to leave, Gretchen is unwillingly pulled into the weirdness occurring in the mountain wilderness. The look of CUCKOO stands out in its jewel-toned quaintness, with the old-fashioned resort’s '80s-inspired turquoise colors and outdated technologies. The outstanding costuming, too, is vintage looking, with only Gretchen’s use of her smartphone as a nod to the contemporary setting; it makes everything feel even more unsettling. But for CUCKOO, it is sound—​and, in turn, silence—​that is the most disturbing and affective sense, both in the ways in which the creature in woods controls its victims through high-pitched noises and in the emotional arch of Gretchen. A musician, she also calls her old answering machine throughout the film just to hear her mother’s comforting voice again. Sound is the most liminal of senses, and CUCKOO plays around with its ability to bring us back and forth in time and space. To her benefit, Gretchen herself can understand this, even as her unwieldy teenage self blunders her way through the oddness and cruelty that surround her. (2024, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Mark L. Lester’s FIRESTARTER (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 7pm

By 1984, Stephen King’s books were frequently adapted into films. Starting with CARRIE in 1976, the list of film adaptations includes THE SHINING, CUJO, THE DEAD ZONE, CREEPSHOW, CHRISTINE, and CHILDREN OF THE CORN. Adapting a King story conferred prestige on certain directors, aligning them with figures like Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, and David Cronenberg. Universal Studios initially offered FIRESTARTER to John Carpenter during his arduous twelve-week filming of THE THING. Disappointing box office returns, reflecting that audiences were not ready for nihilistic alien horror, prompted Universal to cut the budget of FIRESTARTER in half. Carpenter declined the job and instead made CHRISTINE with Columbia Pictures. Mark L. Lester, who had just directed CLASS OF 1984, was picked as Carpenter's replacement, as Universal was impressed by Lester’s ability to deliver on a minimal budget. FIRESTARTER turned a modest profit and offered Lester a valuable lesson in studio filmmaking, which he applied to his next film, COMMANDO (1985). Lester’s career began with drive-in movies. He idolized Howard Hawks for his ability to create films in all genres and set out to do the same. From road movies to roller-skate disco musicals to punk rock revenge thrillers, he set himself up for the same versatility as his icon. Lester embraced the challenge of adapting King’s story about a government agency pursuing a father and daughter with extraordinary powers. David Keith stars as Andy McGee, whose primary goal is to protect his daughter, Charlie (played by an 8-year-old Drew Barrymore), from being exploited by The Shop—a shadowy government agency featured across King’s works. The Shop wants to harness Charlie’s pyrokinesis for military use. FIRESTARTER stays true to King’s novel, exploring themes of government mistrust and father-daughter bonds while blasting a synth-heavy Tangerine Dream score. Andy and his wife Vicky (Heather Locklear) gain telekinetic powers after a government-sanctioned LSD experiment goes wrong. Their daughter Charlie inherits pyrokinesis, and the family lives under The Shop’s scrutiny. When The Shop kidnaps Charlie and kills Vicky, Andy uses his abilities to rescue his daughter. They spend a year evading capture until they are finally caught by the malevolent John Rainbird, portrayed chillingly by George C. Scott. The father and daughter are then held by Captain Hollister (Martin Sheen), who will decide their fate. An escape attempt culminates in an incendiary reunion. King’s novel mirrors real-world events involving government experiments with LSD, particularly the declassified documents from 1975 regarding Army intelligence testing. Program EA 1729, which tested LSD on unknowing citizens, eventually evolved into MK Ultra, which used the drug on soldiers. This backdrop shaped King’s distrust of government, a sentiment echoed in his stories and film adaptations. Despite some studio interference affecting the pacing, the actors’ performances elevate the film above its genre. FIRESTARTER also represents one of the last times Stephen King publicly criticized an adaptation of his work. His dissatisfaction led him to adapt his story “Trucks” into the cult disaster MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE (1986). After its failure, King seemed to gain a newfound respect for filmmakers adapting his work. Screening as part of the Graveyard Shift series. (1984, 114 min DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Satoshi Kon's PAPRIKA (Japan/Animation)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30pm

PAPRIKA was Satoihi Kon's final film, and what a wonderful way to wrap up a remarkable career. Kon passed away in 2010 due to pancreatic cancer at the early age of 46, but his work has left a lasting impression on cinema, inspiring filmmakers worldwide and even garnering some copycats, to put it nicely (just Google it). In PAPRIKA, we see the culmination of themes and stylizations that occur throughout his work; it also represents a boundlessly creative approach to the anime medium. Kon often blurred the line between reality and fantasy, and in PAPRIKA he addresses the world of dreams and its position in our worldview. The titular Paprika is the dream persona of a psychologist who enters patients' dreams to help guide their rehabilitation. Things get chaotic when someone steals a device that makes Paprika's dream-hopping possible and starts to use it for nefarious purposes. PAPRIKA successfully juggles a multitude of genres—it’s a horror movie, comedy, and psychological thriller at the same time. Kon, like a few of his contemporaries, recognized the similarities between cinema and dreams. Filmmakers like David Lynch and Apichatpong Weerasethakul are known for utilizing dream logic in their films, and Kon deserves to be mentioned in the same discussions about the close relationship between these two forms. In PAPRIKA, Kon recognizes that cinema has the power to manipulate and replicate dreams, and he questions the morality of cinema's ability to do so. Is it wrong to toy freely with dreams, places of purity and unbounded freedom and safe havens from the harsh reality that plagues our waking lives? Kon decides that, through cinema we can take the joy and freedom of our dreams and transplant them into our day-to-day lives for everyone to enjoy. Screening as part of Animation Adventures. Arrive early for a Drink & Draw and create your own animation in the Music Box Lounge from 9pm to 11pm. It’s B.Y.O.Art.Supplies. Hosted by Amanda Freja Johanson. (2006, 90 mins, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]

Richard Shepard’s THE LINGUINI INCIDENT (US)

Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:30am

More than three decades after his solo directorial debut was rushed into theaters in a less-than-desired form, Richard Shepard has returned to his pseudo-anonymous early-'90s crime comedy THE LINGUINI INCIDENT with a new edit that, ideally, will bring this mélange of cinematic kookiness to a whole new generation. Shepard’s particular brand of quirky atmospherics may come off as cinematic cilantro to some, but I was unabashedly taken with the mode of play here, most notably the film’s primary setting: the garish upper-class restaurant Dali, a teal-and-pink surrealist monstrosity of fine dining catering to the “trendsucking leeches” of New York City. Here, our primary scenario unfolds, where a waitress with a penchant for escape artistry (Rosanna Arquette) teams up with a love-crazy bartender with a horrific gambling addiction (David Bowie) to rob the place for their own respective screwball motivations. In its best moments, the film achieves kaleidoscopic moments of top-notch visual humor aided by committed oddball performances (particularly of note: Marlee Matlin as a hilariously unserious hostess, and the bizarre pairing of Andre Gregory and Buck Henry as the restaurant’s demented owners). For many, the most attention-grabbing pleasure will be the cementing of another star in the ever-expanding constellation of the multi-faceted David Bowie’s ever-chameleonic career; he's cast here in a cinematic light otherwise unexplored as a romantic comedy lead. Even the most ardent Bowie fan will be thrilled to see this particular brand of unseen lovestruck comic skill from the late icon, his effervescent charm employed here to delightful ends. (1991, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Danny DeVito's MATILDA (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 11:30am

Children’s literature is often focused on abandonment—a child who's a missing parent or even orphaned completely, on one’s own or placed in the care of heartless guardians. Roald Dahl’s Matilda is rather about the struggle of dealing with selfish and incompetent parents. In his adaptation, Danny DeVito plays Mr. Wormwood, Matilda’s scheming father. He also provides a voiceover throughout the film as an omniscient narrator. It may seem unnecessary, but in a children’s film about child abuse, DeVito’s dual presence provides a balance to the horrors that Matilda (Mara Wilson) faces every day. He also provides an off-kilter cinematic world, with saturated bright colors and exaggerated camera angles and close-ups to emphasize a child’s perspective. It’s not a storybook, but the style is exaggerated just enough to steady the implications of real horror the characters face. Born to the Wormwoods (Rhea Perlman plays her mother, in stupendously kitschy costumes and makeup), Matilda learns to take care of herself at a very young age, her intellect allowing her to manage on her own—and develop telekinetic powers. She also finds comfort in books, escaping into the fictional worlds they provide. She finally gets her wish of going to school and is there provided some much-needed comfort from her sweet teacher, Miss Honey (Embeth Davidtz); however, she continues to be mistreated there, now by the terrifying principal Miss Trunchbull who actively hates children. Played with impressive unhingedness by Pam Ferris, Trunchbull is the true villain of the film. While the Wormwoods are cruel, they rarely come off as truly threatening, providing much of the comedy of the film. Trunchbull gets in some hilarious one-liners, but she is an unambiguously violent character. Again, MATILDA uses exaggeration here to counteract any realistic violence, but the horror of angry and hateful adults is ever present. Fortunately, MATILDA is ultimately a story of resilience, friendship, and the profound effect of small and big kindnesses alike. Screening as part of the Kids Camp series. (1996, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

🎞️ ALSO SCREENING

🎞️ ONLINE SCREENINGS/EVENTS

⚫ VDB TV
Saif Alsaegh: Bittersweet Landscape, a program of three short films by Alsaegh, screens for free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: August 9 - August 15,2024