Ray Pride

A shambling yet exceptionally good movie with gorgeous visual interludes befitting the work of co-producer Terrence Malick, Laura Dunn's "The Unforeseen" is an overt agit-doc about irresponsible land-use policies and practice over a couple of decades in a suburb of Austin, Texas. It's a bracing cautionary tale about the plague of inconvenient natural tsunamis of all sorts suddenly cresting left and right around the world: there are sins of omission as well as commission, and there are unintended consequences from every action that isn't sufficiently thought through. Throw money into the mix, oh man. God does not smile down on this batch of developers. (A notable quote: "Nature, in your life, very quickly becomes God. A God who gives great abundance at times, and takes everything away at times.") Dunn's ecological awareness doesn't make her film a harangue, but instead an often lyrical and deeply melancholy work about the costs of growth filled with stories of greed and hurt. The movie wanders but it's filled with wonders of the fallen world: The camerawork by Lee Daniel ("Dazed and Confused," "The Order of Myths," "Fast Food Nation") is especially fine. 88m.

"The Unforeseen" opens Friday at Siskel.

(2008-04-29)

Also by Ray Pride

Something Happened
The relatively young Korean director Hong Sang-soo, who studied at the School of the Art Institute, is one of the younger directors whose characters' seemingly diffident or reckless behavior is in fact only an apparition of normalcy or the everyday
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Tip of the Week
The debut release from Chicago's newest distribution label, Music Box Films, "Tuya's Marriage" is a brightly colored, genial story of culture clash in the form of a not-quite-ethnographic romantic comedy
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A feel-good movie about old people singing? Oh no no no, my my, no. That's the common reaction the terrific "Young@Heart" gets before people have seen it, from the people I was raving about it to
(2008-04-15)

Pie Eyed
Film directors rarely indulge in wholesale revision of their work; so-called director's cuts going back to a baggier version of what's in the theaters, yes, but a wholesale rethinking, no. Wong Kar-Wai seems to have done it on almost every project he's tackled
(2008-04-15)

Tip of the Week
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Tip of the Week
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Uplifting the Nightingale
(2008-04-08)

Tip of the Week
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Sees the Day
(2008-03-25)

Tip of the Week
(2008-03-25)

Tip of the Week
(2008-03-18)

And the Band Played On
(2008-03-11)

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