Some Movies to See This Weekend, October 17, 2014

Some Movies to See This Weekend, October 17, 2014

It's another eclectic (eccentric?) weekend at the movies, with the wide releases covering as huge a range of interest and audience as possible, and the latest acting showcase from one of cinema's best premiering at the Chicago International Film Festival. As usual, this isn't a completely comprehensive list of everything you can find, but you're likely to find something of interest when you look at a marquee this weekend.

The Book of Life

Director: Jorge R. Gutierrez

Writers: Jorge R. Gutierrez, Douglas Langdale

Starring: Diego Luna, Zoe Saldana, Channing Tatum

This is the big time animated family release, featuring the voices of big time stars and showcasing a big time adventure. In a faux-stop motion CGI style, a lovesick young man (Luna) has to return from a party-filled afterlife to reunite with the woman he loves (Saldana) and save his town from destruction at the hands of other supernatural beings.

The trailer features two frustrating modern crutches, a dated pop culture reference (Biz Markie's “Just a Friend”) and the use of “Seriously?” (see also: “Really?”) in place of a constructing a true punchline. Pet peeves aside, there's some pedigree here, with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, Pacific Rim) producing a fairy tale that is refreshingly non-Anglophile in origin. Luna and Saldana always do strong work, and Tatum's dopey charisma is palpable even in animated form. You're probably in good hands here, especially if you have kids in your life.

The Best of Me

Director: Michael Hoffman

Writers: J. Mills Goodloe, Will Fetters

Starring: Michelle Monaghan, James Marsden, Luke Bracey, Liana Liberato

The latest from the Nicholas Sparks adaptation factory, The Best of Me spans two decades in the lives of a pair of high school sweethearts torn apart by drug-related prison time. They reunite 21 years later, looking absolutely nothing like their high school selves – the Bracey-Marsden age-up is particularly mystifying – to give it another go despite some big life obstacles.

Sparks adaptations are overwrought with schmaltz, but sometimes they can work – The Notebook is a fairly strong melodrama – plus Monaghan and Marsden (Mr. Liz Lemon himself) have done strong work elsewhere. This fulfills the romance portion of the weekend bill.

Fury

Director: David Ayer

Writer: David Ayer

Starring: Brad Pitt, Shia LeBeouf, Logan Lerman

The grim, horrific nature of war is on full display in this men-on-a-mission film from End of Watch writer-director David Ayer. I wouldn't count on much uplift here, despite the premise taking place at the very end of the European theater, with our heroes on the cusp of their most triumphant moment.

Ayer is working in John Ford-Sam Peckinpah territory here, with camaraderie, duty, violence, and masculinity being the driving forces. Brad Pitt does his gravitas thing as a tank sergeant and the no-way-he's-possibly-22-years-old Logan Lerman (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) continuing his progression toward leading man status. Despite its gritty violence, this is likely to get a big Oscar push, so you can probably expect to be seeing it mentioned a lot in the coming months.

Two Days, One Night

Directors: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne

Writers: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne

Starring: Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Pili Groyne

A woman (Cotillard) on the verge of losing her job has to make a frustrating, demeaning choice to visit her coworkers, one-by-one, over the course of a weekend in order to convince them to give up part of their salary to leave her position off the chopping block. They have already voted on pay raises for themselves at her expense, so she's in a precarious, frightening spot.

Coming off The Immigrant earlier this year, the already great Cotillard (Inception, Rust and Bone) is at the height of her skills as an actor, able to turn desperation into strength and tenacity. It's a theme that has followed her throughout her career, and she is able to make broken characters become something more than victims, avoiding easy sympathy-only pathos and creating rounded, human people. And she gets to do it again Sunday at CIFF.

Chicago International Film Festival Celebrates 100 Years of Chaplin

Chicago International Film Festival Celebrates 100 Years of Chaplin

The Chicago International Film Festivalgot commemorative last night by bringing Charlie Chaplin biographer David Robinson for a discussion called “Centenary of the Tramp,” about the 100^th anniversary of Chaplin's entrance to the filmmaking industry.

Robinson, author of Chaplin: His Life and Art, which formed the basis for the 1992 biopic starring Robert Downey, Jr., gave a collegial lesson, PowerPoint and all, about Chaplin's early life and his first forays into the movies. He showed rare slides of a young Chaplin on the London stage, as a young side character in Sherlock Holmes stage shows, as a prestigious West End actor at the age of 16, and others before he left for America in 1913.

Robinson knew his venue, though, and quickly moved to Chaplin's early film career, with some slides of his first screen appearance in Makinga Living, as a 25-year-old Keystone Comedy Company player in 1914.

As it's impossible to talk about Chaplin without discussing his Little Tramp character, Robinson focused the rest of his talk on a more important anniversary, the 99^thof the Tramp's first screen credit, in Kid Auto Races at Venice, which Robinson screened for the audience.

As a film, Kid Auto Races at Venice is nothing fancy, which Robinson admitted before showing it, but it's a fascinating historical document nonetheless. Chaplin's Tramp look is basically fully formed, but his mannerisms are not quite to where they would be. He's more restrained, less fluid than he would later be, and his antics are subdued, with the entire plot of the six-minute short revolving around Chaplin trying to hog the camera from a group of newsreel cameramen at a children's boxcar race. It's silly but obviously an early attempt at something that would be important without being important in any way beyond historical firsts.

It turns out that first showing of Chaplin's signature creation wasn't a product of months of hard work and character building, but rather something he pulled from the top of his head when asked by the studio to create a comedic character on the fly. He went to the wardrobe department and pulled out the “baggy pants, tight coat, small hat, big shoes” before applying his goofy mustache and eyebrows, Robinson said, which were all an attempt to make the youthful Chaplin look much older.

Robinson said the character wasn't the “lovable” person he would later become in films like the romantic, sentimental City Lights. In his earliest appearances, the Tramp was actually sometimes a villainous man, and oftentimes not even exactly what one would consider a tramp, that poor, ragged vagabond guy.

“Tramps don't usually give tips,” Robinson said after he showed a clip of a drunken Tramp at a country club bar. He also sometimes rode a motorcycle, had upper crust friends, and a comfortable family life, depending on which early short films you watch, Robinson said.

But, Robinson said, one primary theme remained true of virtually all of Chaplin's Tramp pictures: He was “always struggling to belong to conventional society.” Regardless of his starting point in his films, the Tramp was always something of an outsider, a goofball that can't quite crack social norms.

Robinson ended the night with a showing of one of Chaplin's earliest directorial efforts, The Immigrant, which showed off his technical chops and the lovable, destitute version of the Tramp character we recognize. The short mostly takes place on a boat to American shores, and the camera wobbles back and forth as the “waves” hit the boat, nauseating the passengers, including one bearded man who is perpetually on the verge of vomiting on Chaplin. The dining room aboard the boat is a masterful set piece, a possibly hydraulically lifted room – some sort of physical manipulation is being done to it, whether it's mechanical in nature or not – that allows Chaplin to roll all over the floor, toss about atop other passengers, and have a bowl of gruel shift from the Tramp to his nauseated friend and back again. It's a beautiful, vibrant piece of technical filmmaking from a director known more for his acting and sentimentality than anything.

And now we get to be excited every year, because for a long time to come, each calendar shift will mark a new 100th anniversary for the Tramp.

5 Films to Start Your Chicago International Film Festival

5 Films to Start Your Chicago International Film Festival

The 50th Chicago International Film Festival kicked off October 9th and is now in full swing. There is something for everyone at the fest, but how do you choose what to see? Here are five movies to get you started.

Force Majeure An outwardly perfect family vacations in the French Alps. When an avalanche hits the restaurant, the father (Johannes Kuhnke) runs and leaves his family behind. Now he needs to accept his actions and deal with his family’s reactions to his abandonment. Director Ruben Ostlund was interested in the fact a high number of survivors of ordeals divorce. They survived, but how are they supposed to live? He explores the question so many of us have asked, “What would you do in that situation?” The backdrop lends itself to reflection. The director, Ruben Ostlund, got his start with ski films. He captures the sense of majesty and the vacuum snow can create. We feel that eery, wet quiet snow produces as the family figures out how to go forward.

1001 Grams A weight and measures scientist lives a very stringent life. Her work is her rock. When her fellow scientist father has a heart attack, we follow her from Norway to France and back as she learns how to create a balanced life. This driest of dry comedies was Norway’s official entry to the Academy Awards. They play it so serious you almost wonder if they know it’s a comedy. She literally carries the weight of her life around as she chaperones the country’s kilo to be recalibrated. She learns some weights are greater than the ones she can measure.

Beloved Sisters When the two Lengefeld sisters fall in love with the same man, author/philosopher Friedrich Schiller, they orchestrate their lives to keep their intellectual love triangle alive. While inspired by true events, not much is known about the true nature of the relationships. Director Dominik Graf interprets it as the younger sister, Charlotte, married Friedrich (which was true) but willingly gives him to her sister, Caroline, who married “an evil elephant” to save the family. Caroline became Schiller’s biographer after his death and destroyed almost all correspondence between them. It resembles a triptych painting with each character getting an hour to explore their story.

The Last Five Years Based on the Off-Broadway play, follow the roller coaster five year relationship between a struggling actress and a novelist whose career takes off. Starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, we hear both sides of the story entirely through song.

Free Fall An old woman survives falling off the top of her apartment building. As she climbs the stairs back to her apartment, we see what goes on behind the other inhabitants’ closed doors. Like the tenants of an apartment building, the vignettes range from intriguingly funny to how-am-I-supposed-to-feel shocking. It is Pythonesque in its silly randomness, but also its call for “something completely different.” Director György Pálfiwill (Taxidermia) really shows how film can be used to communicate ideas. The 50th Chicago International Film Festival runs October 9th through 23rd. Visit their website for a schedule of films and lectures.

Some Movies to See This Weekend, October 10, 2014

Some Movies to See This Weekend, October 10, 2014

With the Fall Movie Season now in full swing and the Chicago International Film Festival in town, there is no shortage of movies to catch this weekend. You probably don't want to read 20,000 words previewing everything, so here are some snippets of what I hope to get to this weekend. It's an exciting time, so exciting in fact that I am skipping the first couple Blackhawks games of the season to see some of these. Dedication means sacrifice.

Opening this weekend, October 10, 2014.

ABCs of Death 2

Director: Various
Writer: Various

Starring: Various

The second installment of the alphabet-themed horror anthology, featuring work from the young and hungry (for gore) across the genre looks to be a blend of humor and scares, both of the jumpy and earwormy. It can startle you momentarily or make you more afraid of the encroaching evils of the world, then make you cackle like a maniac. This plays late Saturday evening at the Chicago International Film Festival, located at the AMC River East 21 on 322 E. Illinois St.

The Babadook

Director: Jennifer Kent

Writer: Jennifer Kent

Starring: Essie Davis, Daniel Henshall, Tiffany Lindall-Knight

Playing tonight at CIFF, writer-director Jennifer Kent makes her feature directorial debut with a subjective camera and expressionistic lighting and sets. From the trailer alone, it's clear Kent is returning to the horror of very old, the type of thing that freaked out people when Nosferatu was slowly sauntering toward them and the Somnambulist of Dr. Caligari's cabinet awoke from his slumber.

Plus it's about how freaky kids can be. Not just by saying weird things, like most movies of this ilk rely on for easy fright, but the scary stuff they actually do, like creating working crossbows out of blocks of wood and darts.

Kill the Messenger

Director: Michael Cuesta

Writer: Peter Landesman

Starring: Jeremy Renner, Robert Patrick, Jena Sims, Michael Kenneth Williams, Ray Liotta

Jeremy Renner stars as journalist Gary Webb, who chased down a story in the mid-1990s about the U.S. government's involvement in cocaine smuggling, via the CIA. For all the hoopla made about believing in conspiracy theories in the early part of the trailer, this looks like a smaller version of what audiences have been accustomed to in the paranoid thriller genre since Marathon Man, the “everything is connected” plot that encompasses the whole world and indicates that evil is everywhere, so you better watch out.

This is based on reality, a heightened truth as per its medium, but truth nonetheless. Webb discovered that the CIA did do at least some of these things, but I'm hoping to see a narrative retrenchment away from the expansiveness and hard-to-keep-secret (therefore less plausible) nature of older conspiracy thrillers and more about the smaller, easier-to-cover-up evils perpetrated in reality.

StretchDirector: Joe Carnahan

Writers: Joe Carnahan (screenplay), Jerry Corley & Rob Rose and Joe Carnahan (story)

Starring: Patrick Wilson, Ed Helms, Ray Liotta, Brooklyn Decker

Joe Carnahan makes movies about masculinity to the hilt, the alpha males of the world drawn to gargantuan proportions, like a little kid drawing the biceps on Superman. This can be fascinating and transporting (The Grey) or it can be stylish atom bombs of empty violence (Smokin' Aces). The fact that the latter is used in the trailer for this, Carnahan's sixth feature, gives me pause.

However, this week's Grantlandinterview with Carnahan, in which he discusses his strained, often explosive relationship with Hollywood and its influences on his work here, which he describes as a satire, gives me hope. Lots of bleak, selfish people populate the trailer, with presumably more to come in the full film, and they don't seem to get the best fates. Best of all, it's now available Video On Demand to watch anytime you want.

Whiplash

Director: Damien Chazelle

Writer: Damien Chazelle

Starring: Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist

If anyone has had a contentious, negative reinforcement relationship with a teacher, this is a film that might drudge up some nasty memories. Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons spar in screw-tightening fashion in a movie that made people flip at Sundance earlier this year. Some have said it's on the shortlist of best films of the year, and I think this trailer is only a hint of what is involved. Instead of the gleeful violence depicted in Stretch, this is horrific, real world violence caused by pain and poor instruction. All this atop the knowledge that writer-director Damien Chazelle also worked on 2014's other great classical music-themed thriller, Grand Piano, and I cannot wait to see it.

Chicago International Film Festival's 50th Anniversary Keeps Greatness Rolling

Chicago International Film Festival's 50th Anniversary Keeps Greatness Rolling

Twenty-two year old Michael Kutza founded Cinema/ Chicago in 1964 and the first Chicago International Film Festival debuted the following year at the Carnegie Theatre. Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, this year kicks off October 9th and runs through October 23rd, abounding with innovative films and remastered classics.

Like many things creative in Chicago, the film festival is a place where people can get their start. Everyone involved in the film experience a large international festival and all that entails in an intimate setting. In 1967, the first feature film by Martin Scorsese, “Who’s That Knocking at My Door?”, was presented. Reviewing the film was one of Roger Ebert’s first assignments for the Chicago Sun Times. It’s a place of premieres and world premieres. John Lennon and Yoko Ono world premiered two short films in 1969. In 1975 “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” had its world premiere with Jack Nicholson and other cast members attending Opening Night. Film goers get to see cutting edge wonders in their hometown, achieving one of Kutza’s goals for “Chicago to be a home of appreciation of international film”. Each film festival has a “feel” to it; if you go here, you should expect this type of film. The Chicago Film Festival is thought-provoking, often experimental, a safe grounds for new ideas and new stories. Mayor Richard J. Daley told Kutza in the early days, “The films you show could lose me votes!” and declined public support. In 1969, he acknowledged the festival. A year later, Governor Richard Ogilvie supported the film festival, writing, “Too often, the avante-garde image of the filmmaker has been interpreted as antithetical to the mid-American ethic. But that is a view which disregards an essential element of that ethic: its firm foundation in the concept of original freedom. Film is free, as America is free.” And that is the spirit of the Chicago International Film Festival.

This is the fiftieth anniversary and it promises to be nothing less than brilliant, already nodding to the past in order to look to the future with its rebirth of Victor Skrebneski’s t shirt poster. “For fifty years, it has been my great pleasure to bring the most exciting work in contemporary international cinema to our audiences,” says Michael Kutza. “ This year, we also take a look back and shine a spotlight on some the groundbreaking work that has helped to make the Festival the enduring institution it is.”

He might call it an “institution,” but I would rather call it an incubator, a place where ideas, dreams, and realities intermingle to become something greater than what they could have done as individuals. I’ll be writing every week about the happenings of the Film Festival. I highly encourage you to check it out yourself. More information can be found at www.chicagofilmfestival.com

Chicago International Film Festival Reveals 50th Anniversary Poster by Famed Photographer Victor Skrebneski

Chicago International Film Festival Reveals 50th Anniversary Poster by Famed Photographer Victor Skrebneski

The Chicago International Film Festival unveiled its 50th Anniversary poster on Wednesday at Expo 72. The poster was done by world-renowned photographer Victor Skrebneski. The Chicago photographer attended the unveiling and signed posters for guests.

Festival Founder and Artistic Director Michael Kutza and managing director Vivian Teng thanked Skrebneski and said a few words about the festival before the unveiling. “Victor has been a friend and supporter of the Festival from the very beginning,” said Kutza. “Since that day, back in 1965, when I asked him to spice things up for our Festival poster, he has delivered some of the most iconic and memorable images the city has seen.”

The poster titled “The Next Generation” is a reimagining of Skrebneski’s 1965 T-Shirt poster that shook up the Windy City. While Victor usually photographs adults, the poster features young Braden Cruthers and Noah Warren in the film festivals iconic t-shirt. There was no cattle call audition for the children. “He knew what he wanted,” said agent Jenny Hall of Stewart Talent, who represents Cruthers and Warren. “He knew what type of boy and what type of girl.”

Victor Skrebneski with Noah Warren and Braden Cruthers The unveiling was the first time the kids saw the poster. When the red curtain drew back, their faces lit up. They sparkled in front of it as photographers swooped in for shoots. “It was Michael ’s idea,” Skrebneski said, notorious for not discussing his photographs or the way he works. It may have been Kutza’s idea, but it was Skrebneski’s magic that made the black and white print pop with youthful promise and optimism, the child-like wonder with which many of us approach movies.

Micheal Kutza, Noah Warren, and Braden Cruthers Expo 72, in partnership with the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events and Dark Horse Wine, also hosts a special gallery exhibition, “Because Everybody Loves Movies.” You enter under the iconic film festival logo of smoldering silent film stars’ eyes into a room and you’re surrounded by four foot square photographs by Skrebneski. The dramatic but honest pictures of film icons like Liv Ullman, Bette Davis, and Dennis Hopper are grand and stunning. His portrait of Orson Welles truly is worth a thousand words as it encapsulates all that the legend is: who he was, his presence, and the ideas he conveyed. The exhibit runs until October 30th. The 50th Chicago International Film Festival runs October 9-23, 2014.