NEWCITYCHICAGO.COM: Street Smart Chicago

chicago home

events calendar
bars & clubs
movie clock
restaurants
specials
best of chicago

art
film and video
food and drink
music and clubs
stage
style
words
sports
features

TIP OF THE WEEK
The Cat's Meow

Ray Pride

After directing 1993's sassy, likable "The Thing Called Love," Peter Bogdanovich compiled books, acted on "The Sopranos" (as the therapist's therapist) and shot TV movies. "The Cat's Meow," based on a play by Steven Peros, has a polite refinement that resembles his earlier work, drawing from the unpretentious, classical camera style of the likes of Howard Hawks and John Ford, with several Wellesian sustained takes, some from relatively low angles. The 62-year-old Bogdanovich manages to make smooth work of a bumpy script. Drawing from "whispers" about a shooting on William Randolph Hearst's yacht in 1925, Peros' script isn't as witty as it might be, and parallels to the director's notoriously beleaguered life--both in Hollywood and in love--aren't forced, making the film more polite than venturesome. But dimpling as Hearst's so-young mistress, actress Marion Davies, Kirsten Dunst is a complicated study, and Eddie Izzard's riff on Charlie Chaplin as a narcissistic satyr is witty in its own perverse way. With Edward Herrmann, a semi-tolerable Jennifer Tilly, Cary Elwes and Joanna Lumley.

"The Cat's Meow" opens April 25.

(2002-04-25)

Also by Ray Pride

PLUG & PLAY
It's a couple hours before a benefit at Heaven Gallery, a couple Saturdays before the opening of Version>02, the "digital arts convergence" (April 18-20 at the Museum of Contemporary Art). Marszewski, or Edmar--as he's been known for the more than a decade he's plied his entrepreneurial media in Chicago--has just quit smoking.
(2002-04-18)

TIP OF THE WEEK
"Time Out," the story of a Frenchman who fabricates a nonexistent job when he is dismissed from a position he's held for eleven years, is the kind of film that keeps you wondering two things: What the hell is going to happen next and why are these cool, placid surfaces so unnerving?
(2002-04-18)

TIP OF THE WEEK
Roger Michell, director of "Persuasion" and "Notting Hill," shows another side to his sensibility with this rich and masterful story (co-written by Michael Tolkin) of two men--cocky lawyer Ben Affleck, weary insurance salesman and alcoholic Samuel L. Jackson--who collide on New York's FDR expressway and proceed, during the course of the day, to try and destroy each other.
(2002-04-11)

CRAZY LOVE
In John McKay's debut feature, "Crush," Andie MacDowell is Kate, lonely headmistress of a private school in England's Cotswolds. She and her two best friends, all in their forties, meet weekly to moan and glory in their failures with men despite their professional success.
(2002-04-11)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-04-04)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-03-28)

PANIC BUTTONS
(2002-03-28)

GLOVE AND MONEY
(2002-03-21)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-03-14)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-03-07)

LETTING GO
(2002-02-21)

SCOLD WAR
(2002-02-14)



		Copyright Newcity Communications, Inc.

Warning: Failed opening '' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/chicagoweb/www_current/chicago/chicago/ssi/footer_film.html on line 10