Ray Pride

Of the many things to admire about Canadian prairie auteur Guy Maddin and his baroque visual escapades, one is his willingness to make short films of fevered stylistic invention. His 2000 "Hearts of the World" is one of the greatest of short films, and with "My Dad is 100 Years Old," a tribute to the filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, written and acted by his daughter, Isabella, Maddin delivers another blissful gem. Isabella, who acted in Maddin's "The Saddest Music in the World," plays herself, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Charlie Chaplin and her mother, Ingrid Bergman. (Isaac Paz, Jr. plays the great belly of Roberto Rossellini.) In a dusty, disused movie theater, she conjures up Roberto as filmmaker and thinker and father; Maddin's invention ranges from Fellini's lip-synch being discernibly off, to a sudden angel's flight projected against the room's cupola that genuinely took my breath away. "My Dad is 100 Years Old" had me in happy tears for most of its just-right length. What a magnificent, inspired dream. What a great daughter. 17m. Shown with Rossellini's "The Flowers of St. Francis."

"My Dad is 100 Years Old" opens Friday at the Music Box.

(2006-06-13)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
The Opening Night Program of the 18th Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, shown at the Siskel Film Center, produced by Chicago Filmmakers, has two distinct highlights
(2006-06-06)

Edifice complexities
"Sketches of Frank Gehry" by Sydney Pollack is a unique documentary, an ongoing appreciation-cum-bitch session between a pair of successful men in their seventies who must navigate the ego and caprice of other men who would give them the millions to practice their respective crafts of architecture and moviemaking
(2006-06-06)

Patriotic Gore
Two bits of testimony to the strength of "An Inconvenient Truth": in the first week of its release, on both Fox and in the Washington Post, the name of Vice President Al Gore has been linked to Adolf Hitler; and Variety's charts for the past weekend noted that a four-screen tally of $365,787 was the highest per-screen total ever for a documentary
(2006-05-30)

Tip of the Week
Aside from one of the greatest titles of all time, Frank Borzage's eclectic comedy-romance-melodrama, set in Paris and Manhattan, "History Is Made at Night" (1937) contains some of the most jaw-droppingly agile shifts of tone in classical Hollywood screenplay construction
(2006-05-30)

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Rush Hour 3
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Art Break
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Murder ballad
(2006-05-16)

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