Ray Pride

Nina Davenport's "Operation Filmmaker" is a cringe-making collection of cultural conflicts that illuminates the quantity of ego involved in any level of filmmaking as much as any movie in memory. Taking as her subject 25-year-old Muthana Mohmed, an Iraqi film student who'd been featured on MTV's "True Life" and was hell-bent for Hollywood, Davenport follows him onto the set of Liev Schreiber's directorial début, his adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, "Everything Is Illuminated." Mohmed does not make the intern hall of fame, to put it simply, even before taking issue with "the Jewish theory" of the Holocaust as embodied in Schreiber's project. Davenport's moral misgivings as filmmaker after all heck breaks loose quickly suggest a kind of quagmire, and a telling parable of American involvement in other cultures that does not become ponderous, but blackly comic, about ego, prejudice and filmmaking's myriad compromises. "Operation Filmmaker" is chaotic, but what a marvelous mess. 90m.

"Operation Filmmaker" opens Friday at Siskel.

(2008-06-10)

Also by Ray Pride

All the Little Things
The English original of "The Office" is more about malfeasance and malapropism, about raging egos of small people, and the American variation found its footing in the giddy range of its characters (and respective actors). Still, it's a gratifying surprise to find that Chicago-based screenwriter Steve Conrad's auspicious directorial debut, capturing the rivalry between two men, mild-mannered, levelheaded Doug (Sean William Scott) and eccentric Québécois transplant Richard (John C. Reilly), for a manager's job at a supermarket, is a likeable, often-tender, lovingly paced comedy of no small charm
(2008-06-03)

Tip of the Week
While not stodgy, "The Children of Huang Shi" is an old-fashioned melodrama, where gestures and postures and epic landscapes (shot with gorgeous sweep by Zhao Xiaoding, of "House of Flying Daggers," "Curse of the Golden Flower") carry the story rather than the script
(2008-06-03)

Tip of the Week
After a number of years in a number of wildernesses, Tennessee wild-boy Harmony Korine is 35 and back with his clear-eyed third directorial venture
(2008-05-27)

Dog Days
Johnny Ratones is humping my leg with quiet urgency as I simmer on the porch swing waiting for Sally to come from the kitchen with the smokes she'd stowed just above the freezer with the taped-down tearsheet of Johnny's Cash's extended digit. Even in the worst neighborhoods, sitting on the back porch on summer can be the most romantic escape. I miss having my own back porch, I think, as lightning lights, thunder cracks. The filthy black Lab hopes to bite into my thigh as I shake off his embracing forelegs.
(2008-05-20)

Tip of the Week
(2008-05-20)

Image That
(2008-05-20)

Chitty-chitty Slam-bang
(2008-05-13)

Tip of the Week
(2008-05-13)

Heavy Meta
(2008-05-06)

Tip of the Week
(2008-05-06)

How Do Photographs Mean?
(2008-04-29)

Tip of the Week
(2008-04-29)

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