Ray Pride

After the Oscar nominations are announced, Bill Siegel says he can't do "Chicago Tonight" that evening: he's at O'Hare, breathlessly on his way to New York City to join his "The Weather Underground" documentary co-director Sam Green to record the DVD extras.

"We got Bernardine and Bill," he says, happy to be sharing the commentary track with the former radicals, the now-married duo of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two of the better-known subjects of their low-key portrayal of the terrorist Chicago splinter group of the avowedly nonviolent Students For A Democratic Society. There's a chuckle in Siegel's slightly dazed voice as he thinks back on the past year since its Sundance 2003 premiere. Like the quiet testimony of the reformed and not-so-reformed subjects of the documentary (which plays PBS in late April as well), the 42-year-old feature neophyte is unassuming even up against the competition for the little gold man. "Errol Morris!" is all he says over the cell about the shaggy-genius director of "The Fog of War." (Family dysfunction fest "Capturing the Friedmans"; generational dysfunction fest "My Architect"; political exodus from Cuban societal dysfunction fest "Balseros" comprise the rest of the competition.)

The documentary category's been revised several times since Morris' "Thin Blue Line" failed to get nominated, as with 1996's shutout of Chicago's Kartemquin Films for their painstaking "Hoop Dreams." "How does it feel? It feels great!" is Siegel's completely adequate banality. New York today, but as for "Chicago Tonight"? "Maybe next week," he says, the bustle of modern-day air traffic alive behind him.

(2004-02-03)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
This touching, lovingly detailed story of three homeless people in Tokyo who discover an angelic baby that's been left in the trash at Christmas, ably transcends what are sometimes considered the limitations of animation
(2004-01-28)

Indie Jones
It's the first screening at Slamdance, the ten-year-old competitor to twenty-year-old Sundance, of Chicago-made, long-in-the-works "Nightingale in a Music Box..."
(2004-01-28)

Tip of the Week
There's something haunting at the center of "The Fog of War," Errol Morris' characteristically imagistic documentary, an interrogation of former Secretary of State Robert McNamara
(2004-01-20)

Full of grace
Robert Luketic extends the goofy comic timing and invention he demonstrated in "Legally Blonde" with the carefully calibrated silliness of "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!"
(2004-01-20)

Death becomes him
(2004-01-20)

Short Runs
(2004-01-20)

Tip of the Week
(2004-01-13)

Short Runs
(2004-01-13)

Spun
(2004-01-13)

Night of the laughing dead
(2004-01-13)

Tip of the Week
(2004-01-06)

Charlize's Angles
(2004-01-06)

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