Ray Pride

I almost get migraines sometimes from looking at lists of the number of films that open in major cities each weekend.

No matter how wonderful or thrilling or great a movie might be--and there are trends in filmmaking from around the globe that are heartening--it has to get into theaters and into the public consciousness, and week after week, film distribution seems more and more a slow-motion train wreck. Despite all the what-the-hell-just-happened articles in the national press, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was a huge damn anomaly, a twice-a-decade bit of chain lightning.

The list of titles for the 38th Chicago International Film Festival contains films as good as you'll see anywhere on earth, and many of them already have distribution planned in the coming months or year. A list of almost 100 programs to select from is hardly daunting when you consider the weekends that a dozen films might open with nine or ten of them destined to quickly slink off to the video shelves at Facets.

But the movies! Lynn Ramsay is one of the more important new visualists to emerge in movies; her first feature, "Ratcatcher," is on DVD with several shorts that are simply intoxicating in their specificity and in their dreaminess. Her newest, "Morvern Callar," based on a Scottish novel, tracks a Glasgow shop-girl on an escape to Ibiza after the suicide of her boyfriend. Two more words about this movie: Samantha Morton.

Paul Anderson's Adam Sandler vehicle, "Punch-Drunk Love," is an aggressive portrait of disconnection that will either disturb or annoy the shit out of you. It may be the young director's best picture yet. Another whimsical stylist, Finland's Aki Kaurismaki, finally returns to the screen with "The Man Without a Past." Paul Schrader's "Auto Focus" is also an auteurist entry, resembling his early work while hardly resembling entertainment except in Greg Kinnear's brilliant portrayal of TV star Bob Crane as he descends into an obsession with sex and video. But if you want something truly nasty, check out Austrian high-culture bad-taste director Ulrich Seidl's "Dog Days," a truly loathsome portrait of suburban that ranks down there with the worst of Michael Haneke's ho-hummers. Otar Iosseliani is also in the festival with "Monday Morning," the latest of his always memorably, loopy, poetic whimsies.

Among documentaries, Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" is a blackly funny, often-moving, always-angry essay that asks questions about violence in our society, while never presuming to have any answers. "Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary" is said to be a chiller, in which the dictator's former secretary recounts daily life fifty years ago in an almost uninterrupted monologue. Pennebaker and Hegedus' "Only the Strong Survive" is a rich portrait of soul musicians from the heyday of Stax and Motown. But Rob Fruchtman and Rebecca Cammisa's "Sister Helen" may be the most memorable of characters in any CIFF documentary, a hard-as-nails Benedictine nun who almost out-trash-talks R. Lee Ermey in her battle to keep her charges sober.

There are several fact-based dramas, including Philip Noyce's "Rabbit-Proof Fence," a magnificently made, moving story of a trio of Aboriginal girls who escape a government camp in 1930s Australia. Everything clicks, from Noyce's pacing, to Chris Doyle's blue-and-brown palette of light, to Peter Gabriel's score. John Malkovich's directorial debut, "The Dancer Upstairs," is an intelligent, involving portrait of valor and politics in the strife-torn Peru of the 1970s. Mike Leigh returns with "All or Nothing," his latest searing portrait of family life; equally coruscating may be Paul Greengrass' "Bloody Sunday," a rich, harsh, powerful portrait of the day of the most important confrontation of the Irish conflict. Patterned after Pontecorvo's "Battle of Algiers," it comes close to its intensity. Another conflict is dealt with in "Divine Intervention," Elia Suleiman's study of a Palestinian director who lives in Jerusalem returning to the other side of the barricades, said to be as acerbic as the work of Nanni Moretti and as deadpan as Tati.

I'm anxious to see Alexander Sokurov's "Russian Ark," a 100-minute-long, unbroken take in high-definition video, trailing through a series of tableaux in the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg. Its reverie or Russian history said to be dreamily brilliant, rather than a mad indulgence. But what's a little mad indulgence among those who love movies?

Click here for screening times for these movies.

(2002-10-02)

Also by Ray Pride

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It's the one-night launch of So-and-So's Button-o-Matic, aka "Chicago's Smallest Art Gallery."
(2002-09-18)

Tip of the the Week
Writer-director Burr Steers demonstrates a savage verbal wit in this jaw-droppingly mean Salingeresque black comedy of Swiftian bad manners among uppercrust Georgetown and Manhattan.
(2002-09-18)

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In his first feature since 1998's "Elizabeth," Shekhar Kapur found himself shooting his period epic, "The Four Feathers," in the Moroccan desert.
(2002-09-18)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-09-11)

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(2002-09-04)

Sex education
(2002-08-28)

Tip of the Week
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Hit or myth
(2002-08-21)

Reverse zoom
(2002-08-21)

Tip of the Week
(2002-08-14)

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