Ray Pride

(No Quarto da Vanda, 2000) A Lisbon slum is being demolished. Wall-by-wall. Lives are in suspension. Moment by moment. Addicts drift, dreamy, in small, close rooms. The camera is fixed. The takes are long. Faces, life-worn. Light flickers, dances. The gaze is pitying, but not condescending, capturing evanescent tenderness from non-actors. In the almost three hours of Pedro Costa's "Vanda's Room," shot in DV over the course of two years, and edited in a reported year from 130 hours of footage, is an epic of pain and beauty, claustrophobia and elegant tragedy. Pedro Costa's movies sound impermeable, difficult, dullish. (Much of this movie takes place in a small room.) But they're magical, mulish, patient things, surrealism of sadness with spurts of rare beauty, a sort of proto-realism. Poverty is strange; Costa's heard is large. I don’t know of any other director today whose work parallels Costa's. 178m.

"Vanda's Room" plays Saturday and Monday at Siskel. The Pedro Costa retrospective, which includes 1994's "Down To Earth" this week, continues through December, including his best-regarded film, "Colossal Youth."

(2007-11-19)

Also by Ray Pride

All Yesterday's Costume Parties
Todd Haynes, he of "Far From Heaven," "Velvet Goldmine" and "[safe]" is no stranger to the European intellectual filmmaking tradition, nor to relentless citation and layering. Hoping to write about his new not-a-biopic of Bob Dylan, "I’m Not There" almost feels like trying to write footnotes to footnotes, a circular exercise that would wind even the fabulist likes of Jorge Luis Borges
(2007-11-13)

Tip of the Week
Folly, hubris, ambition, confusion, self-contradiction: how more American can you get? One of the glories of the sensory drench of writer-director Richard Kelly's follow-up to "Donnie Darko" is just how marvelous it is at its moments of greatest over-reach
(2007-11-13)

Damn Fine Pie
"We've made some fine pie," the man behind the counter at Atomix Café says with a smile a couple hours before the start of Sunday's into-the-night "Twin Peaks" first-season marathon. A little after three, tables shift and a video projector on a plinth surfaces from under a white shroud. The white screen's backed by red and brown blankets to keep out the falling autumn afternoon. A few flyers had been up for a week or so, and there's not much of a crowd, but the effect is amusing, as owner Adam Paul says, "like doing homework in front of the television"
(2007-11-06)

Atomix Energy
Brimming onto the southernmost boundary of Ukrainian Village, Atomix opened in May 2001, around the first time Wicker Park coffeehouse mainstay Jinx shuttered
(2007-11-06)

Coen Road
(2007-11-06)

Tip of the Week
(2007-11-06)

Present Tension
(2007-10-30)

Tip of the Week
(2007-10-30)

Shades of Graze
(2007-10-23)

Missing the Train
(2007-10-23)

Kaye-dence
(2007-10-23)

Tip of the Week
(2007-10-23)

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