Ray Pride

Sunday, the only thing the gray sky, alternating with slashing rain, seems to stop are suntans.

The Chicago Underground Film Festival closed tonight at the Chopin Theatre and a nearby gallery. Without an umbrella, the temptation to duck in dissipates. I spill into a store on Milwaukee. A friend chides, where’s your umbrella? "Let my smile be my umbrella" only gets a wince. "It’s so gray outside! Where’d the summer go?" a woman says, crashing into the room with a friend who’s got a matching soggy RedEye atop her hair.

Later, I get to Rodan two minutes before the scheduled start, where the awards will be announced in the back. A filmmaker I know and her husband order appetizers; she has no idea about the event. "City of Lost Children" plays on the back wall. Ten minutes pass. Jurors arrive. Photographer Fred Burkhart in an engineer’s cap, khaki shorts and a purple cape. He and Cynthia Plaster-Caster are as boho as the moment gets: CUFF director Bryan Wendorf reads winners off a scrap of paper, apologizing for so-briefly interrupting those who pause above their plates.

"For those of you who didn’t see any films, maybe next year when we’re 15," he says, exiting from the dimly lit corner by the DJ to the mid-room murk.

(2007-08-21)

Also by Ray Pride

Mclovin It
"Superbad" may have more profanity in it than any recent American movie; if you thought "Knocked Up" had its share of tender filth, you ain’t heard nothing yet.
(2007-08-14)

Tip of the Week
Corneliu Porumboiu’s "12:08 East of Bucharest," winner of Cannes 2006’s Camera d’or prize for Best First Film, is wry, dry and gorgeously shaped comedy, deeply satirical while being played with the slyest of hands
(2007-08-14)

Engineering This Fiasco
Kinsella's writing-directing debut, "Orchard Vale," an experimental feature about a band of outsiders after an off-screen collapse of civilization, opens the 14th Chicago Underground Film Festival on August 15, just a few weeks after his decision to leave the band Make Believe
(2007-08-10)

Engineering This Fiasco
Ever prolific, Tim Kinsella, who began his public life as a musician at the age of 16 in the band Cap'n Jazz, has recorded dozens of albums since, and with the meltdown of the music industry, has shifted to filmmaking, itself a troubled medium for anyone wanting to make a career today. His writing-directing debut, "Orchard Vale"
(2007-08-07)

Tip of the Week
(2007-08-07)

Life after Life
(2007-07-31)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-31)

Somewhere Over the Rainbo
(2007-07-24)

The Odyssey
(2007-07-24)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-24)

Space Odyssey
(2007-07-17)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-17)

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