Ray Pride

With "Climates" (Iklimer, 2006), Turkish writer-director-producer-editor-actor Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose "Distant" (Uzak, 2001) is a marvel of tonal balance between sorrow and comedy, has made a funnier, more emotional, more intimate and even more visionary movie in his high-definition dissection of a failing marriage between a middle-aged man and his younger wife (played by Ceylan and his wife, Ebru). Among other things, in an altogether different fashion than "Collateral" or "Miami Vice," Ceylan's use of HD is as groundbreaking as Michael Mann's. More compelling, however, is Ceylan's astringent, unflinching portrait of the modern urban male as a consummate passive-aggressive: there are eruptions in this film that hike my eyebrows even as I type. One of 2006's genuine masterpieces, "Climates" is furiously beautiful on so many levels. "Turkish Cinemascope," a breathtaking array of stunning landscapes that demonstrate Ceylan's substantial pictorial gifts, can be viewed at his site: [http://www.nuribilgeceylan.com/turkeycinemascope1.php?sid=1]. I got to see them at a film festival in Thessaloniki, Greece, which offered up this memorable vignette: finding myself beside a floppy-haired filmmaker with a classy Leica Super-8 camera folded under his arm, equally awestruck before a large-format, widescreen-proportioned photograph of a Turkish village, as he exults to no one in particular, "This could be a Chagall, all that's missing is an angel!" Walter Salles is a fan, too. I wonder who else might be. 101m.

"Climates" opens Friday at the Music Box

(2007-02-13)

Also by Ray Pride

Under Privilege
When word came of "Breaking and Entering," playwright-screenwriter-musician-director Anthony Minghella's first original screenplay since 1991's "Truly Madly Deeply," set in a gentrifying neighborhood like the now-turned Notting Hill, where writer-producer Richard Curtis' less-than-hyper-critical mash notes to real estate also unfold, it seemed like he might have the grasp, the ambition, to capture that, something plausible
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"You have no idea what a long-legged woman can do without doing anything," Claudette Colbert opines in Preston Sturges' 1942 laugh-a-minute "The Palm Beach Story"
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Truth to Power
Festival programmers claimed in advance they'd been more adventurous, more political in their choices than ever and, ironically, 2007 boasted more sales of more diverse movies than any in memory. Guiding light Robert Redford had other things on his mind in opening remarks, when he dismissed the idea that the festival had become merely a market: "There's been buzz about stuff that's tanked." More notably, he positioned himself as "left-handed"
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Tip of the Week
A substantive batch of shorts produced in 2006 and presented by Chicago Filmmakers as "Redefining Video," the work of 17-year-old Michigander Kyle Canterbury has hypnotic moments, working with simple abstractions of concrete things, for the most part, almost all rephotographed off of a video monitor to take advantage of the form's still-evolving potential for capturing texture
(2007-01-30)

Mister Dominick, tear down this wall!
(2007-01-23)

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(2007-01-23)

Tip of the Week
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(2007-01-16)

Tip of the Week
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Teenage Wasteland
(2007-01-09)

Tip of the Week
(2007-01-09)

Tip of the Week
(2007-01-02)

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