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📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Michael Glover Smith’s RELATIVE (US)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

In his writing on movies, both here at Cine-File and elsewhere, Michael Glover Smith has advanced an acute understanding of how the framing of performers in narrative cinema can underscore the emotions they express and how camera movement (or, put another way, the re-framing of performers in time) can develop viewers’ relationships to onscreen characters. Smith’s features as writer-director seem to grow directly out of his insights in this area—deceptively “dialogue-driven,” they express their greatest eloquence not with words but with mise-en-scène. It matters in RELATIVE whether the principal characters are together in the same shot or whether they’ve been individuated by close ups; it matters whether we can distinguish who’s in the background of a shot or whether those characters have been obscured. These things matter because the film is ultimately about the competing forces of community and individuality that shape our identities in 21st-century life and how we navigate between them almost constantly. The action in RELATIVE covers a few days before, during, and after a young man’s college graduation party on Chicago’s far north side, a celebration that draws his two older sisters from out of state and his older brother (a divorced Iraq War veteran who’s been slowly self-destructing for the past four years) out of seclusion in their parents’ basement. Smith gracefully interweaves the lives of all four siblings, their liberal Baby Boomer parents, and a handful of other characters as they come together amiably and unhurriedly, employing the time-honored scenario of the big family gathering to consider how many of us live at the dawn of the 2020s. Not surprisingly, the internet factors into things (though thankfully not too much); so too do food co-ops, queer-straight alliances, and the social normalization of weed. Yet Smith has more on his mind than enumerating aspects of the zeitgeist; RELATIVE is also concerned with the legacy of the Baby Boom generation and, more generally, how each generation honors the previous one while taking a seemingly opposite approach to life. Yasujiro Ozu is an obvious reference point for this sort of laidback family portrait, though I was reminded more of critic-turned-filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier’s A SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY (1984) in the low-key sociological thrust of the drama and of the first episode of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s recently rediscovered miniseries EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY (1972-’73) in the polyphony of the extended graduation party sequence. For all its international flavor, however, RELATIVE is a local production first and foremost, reflecting its maker’s deep affection for the neighborhoods he calls home. (2022, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Buster Keaton and Edward Sedgwick’s THE CAMERAMAN (Silent)

Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 3pm

Cinema’s Great Stone Face was also one of its greatest, most unassailable auteurs, whose best work was as meticulous as it was personal; thus a title like THE CAMERAMAN, with him playing a character desperate to make his mark as a visual storyteller—largely though it may be to get the girl (Buster Keaton was nothing if not efficient)—is fitting for the comedic luminary, who in addition to myriad other talents possessed a keen awareness of the importance of aesthetic composition to the effectiveness of a bit. It’s also lightly ironic here; his first film for MGM, which he co-directed with Edward Sedgwick (Chicago moviegoers might recognize him as the director of THE FIRST DEGREE, a once-thought-lost 1923 silent film found last year by the Chicago Film Archives), is considered by many to be the beginning of the end, a judgement compacted by its being the last major work over which Keaton was able to retain significant creative control. He considered his transition to MGM from his independent endeavors beforehand to be the biggest mistake of his career, a decline perhaps foreshadowed by the fact that the film’s story was devised not by Keaton and his collaborators (as they’d usually done), but by an employee at the studio who wanted the film to resonate with shareholder William Randolph Heart. Keaton didn’t mind the idea, but perhaps because he gave an inch there, he was then on the hook for many a mile after. He stars as a tintype photographer who aspires to become a newsreel cameraman after meeting a beautiful secretary, Sally (Marceline Day), at the MGM Newsreel offices. The plot is composed of their awkward courtship (distinguished by a scene at Buster’s boarding house where he runs up and down the stairs hoping that its Sally calling the communal telephone, the wall of the house removed so that viewers see multiple floors at the same time) and Buster’s attempts at obtaining provocative newsreel footage. However good, THE CAMERAMAN lacks some of the glum surreality that made his previous independent features so iconic. The romance in particular anticipates Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS (1931); it’s admittedly sweet, but it seems overly sentimental for a genius who was ultimately was more guileless than saccharine. Regardless, it's a marked entry in Keaton’s oft-sublime oeuvre, whether viewers wish to see it as the last in a long line of masterpieces or the first in a historic stagnation that persists as one of cinema's grave miscalculations. With live organ accompaniment by Dennis Scott. Presented by Filmspotting, with a post-screening discussion between the podcast hosts and critic and author Dana Stevens about Keaton and her new book, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, which will be recorded for the podcast. (1928, 67 min, 35mm) [Kathleen Sachs]

Robert Zemeckis’ USED CARS (US)

Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm

Olivier Assayas once told me that film history is defined as much by absences as it is by presences; case in point, one finds a compelling and frequently disturbing body of work in various movies that Steven Spielberg produced but didn’t direct. POLTERGEIST (1981), GREMLINS (1984), the remake of CAPE FEAR (1991), and FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS (2006) speak to feelings of cynicism and disdain that Spielberg generally avoids in the films he signs, suggesting that the world’s most beloved filmmaker can acknowledge these feelings only by proxy. USED CARS, directed by Robert Zemeckis from a script he wrote with Bob Gale, is an early and revealing entry in the Evil Spielberg canon—its satire of the American success ethic is so bitter that it often edges into out-and-out disgust. Mercilessly spoofing the nice-guy persona he developed in live-action Disney comedies, Kurt Russell stars as Rudy Russo, an amoral used car salesman whose one goal in life is to get elected to the Arizona state senate so he can live comfortably off bribe money for the rest of his life. In order to do so, he must first raise $60,000 himself to bribe the party boss willing to put him on the ticket. Rudy’s mission gets complicated when his desert rat of a boss (Jack Warden) dies unexpectedly, forcing our hero and his equally amoral coworkers to keep up the pretense that he’s still alive in order to keep the boss’ malicious twin brother Roy L. (Warden again) from inheriting the lot. These developments, as well as the comically exaggerated sales competition that erupts between Rudy and Roy L., sometimes feel like a New Hollywood update on Preston Sturges. The difference (apart from the curse words and explicit nudity of USED CARS) is that Sturges exhibited clear affection for his characters—and even for the all-American ideals he exposed as fraudulent—while Zemeckis and Gale regard their characters as grotesques and their characters’ lack of values as contemptible. Rudy and company are corrupt, petty, sexist, immature, and brazenly selfish. Gremlins of capitalism, they cheerfully and maniacally sell garbage because it allows them to take other people’s money. The visual style of USED CARS may not be as cartoonish or (to borrow a favorite Jonathan Rosenbaum reference point) as redolent of early MAD magazine as that which Spielberg brought to 1941 (1979), another misanthropic satire written by Zemeckis and Gale. Still, the influence of animated movies can be felt in the meticulous timing of the gags and suspense-building. Squint and you can see seeds of the thoroughly dehumanized set pieces of Zemeckis’ unwatchable motion-capture animated features of the 21st century. Preceded by the 1975 Consumers Union short KICKING TIRES IS NOT ENOUGH (17 min, 16mm). (1980, 113 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

David Cronenberg’s CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (Canada)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

David Cronenberg is the most phenomenological of directors. I never feel more aware of being human, more embodied than while watching his films. This is certainly spurred on by his visual body horror, but it’s also found in his fascinating themes about what it means to exist—about consciousness being firmly grounded in the corporeal and whether technology amplifies or obstructs that experience. CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is this Cronenberg at his best, with themes from his previous films coalescing and evolving into something new. Particularly reminiscent of his last true body horror, eXistenZ (1999), where video game consoles are essentially external organs, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE imagines technology as textured and tangible, beautiful and grotesque; with a lot to admire in the film, the viscerally stunning design of the futuristic technologies stands out. It's set in a dystopian future where humans are mutating so they no longer feel pain, surgeries are performed on the streets and new government agencies like the National Organ Registry are founded. Kristen Stewart’s Timlin, an enthusiastic and awkward assistant at that agency, is the highlight in a film of striking and funny performances. But the protagonist here is Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen). He and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) are well-known performance artists, sensually using Saul’s body— primarily the unique organs he can grow—as their canvas. They find themselves at the center of a secretive conflict about humanity’s future —will these strange new mutations be stopped or is there a leaning into the evolution? The plot draws heavily on neo-noir, as Saul covertly slinks through the city, trying to uncover secret factions at work. CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is overall claustrophobic; this dilapidated future is rich with dark corners, shadows, and crumbling structures. At one point a character speaks of the interior of the body as "outer space," suggesting the external world is empty compared to what’s going on inside. The science-fiction world of CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is completely realized, but expertly reveals only so much of its secrets, leaving one with the disappointment that it must end and an eagerness to revisit all of Cronenberg’s work. (2022, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Gaspar Noé's LUX ÆTERNA (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 9pm

The last few years have been unusually productive for Gaspar Noé. Having made films at a deliberate pace for most of the 2000s, he’s put out three films since 2018. The official release of the mid-length LUX ÆTERNA was delayed by the pandemic, so it’s now reaching wider theaters more or less simultaneously with his newest VORTEX (2021); it bridges the conceptual directions of the films on either side of it. As he did in CLIMAX (2018), Noé spends the film in one location, using snaking long takes to explore both the real and constructed rooms of a film set as its inhabitants collectively break down. All the while, he experiments with a dual-projection setup that allows his cameras to follow multiple characters at once, an approach he'd develop at feature length in VORTEX. Though the latter film represents the high-water mark of “restrained” Noé, LUX ÆTERNA is also a relatively subdued film, focusing on the trials and tribulations of two women (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Béatrice Dalle) playing fictionalized versions of themselves. It follows Dalle, an experienced actress but first-time director, as she helms a retelling of the trial of Joan of Arc starring Gainsbourg, a friendly but stretched-too-thin working actress and mother. Jean-Luc Godard gets shout-outs from the characters and in the form of intertitles showing quotes of his about filmmaking (Dreyer and Bresson are referenced this way too), but the talky and referential first 40 minutes are just a lead-in for the director’s real gambit. As the logistics of the production quickly spin out of control, the crew’s gendered antipathy towards the two women reaches a fever pitch, resulting in the film’s strobing final ten minutes. This part brings Noé back to his transgressive roots, but the transgression here is not so much thematic or visual as purely psychotropic. As the film set’s flashing red, blue, and green lights alternate faster and faster, Noé approaches a sort of ecstatically pure image, reducing the difference between a stuttering strobe and a pure white light incrementally. It’s the most deliberately avant-garde moment in a filmography full of outré moves, borrowing from flicker film luminaries like Paul Sharits. It’s a challenging turn for sure, and one that anyone with any sort of photosensitivity should stay far away from, but it suggests a fruitful new direction for Noé where he can succeed in being provocative without doing it for provocation’s sake. Screening as part of the Fringe Benefits series; preceded by movie trivia, hosted by the Gene Siskel Film Center’s Associate Producers. (2019, 51 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]

Terence Davies’ BENEDICTION (UK/US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Terence Davies is a conundrum for me. It’s hard to watch the director self-flagellate in his self-referential works, particularly given his tendency to believe in the primacy of the written word and his half-realized attempts to emulate poetic construction in his shooting style. Yet THE HOUSE OF MIRTH (2000) is one of the most beautifully realized films I have ever seen, and his abilities with actors are evident in all of his feature films. BENEDICTION, a biopic of 20th-century British poet Siegfried Sassoon (played beautifully by Jack Lowden), combines the best and worst of Davies’ tendencies, but the balance does tip in his favor by the end. Davies bookends his film with direct consideration of World War I. Sassoon, an officer who was cited for extreme bravery at the Western Front, presents a letter to his superiors in which he refuses to return to duty because he disagrees with the purposes of the war. Instead of being court-martialed and executed, he is sent to a military hospital for psychiatric treatment. He meets poet Wilfred Owen there, forms a mentorship and platonic attachment with him, and bids him a tearful farewell when Owen, cleared for duty, returns to the fighting and meets his end. From that point on, Davies concentrates almost exclusively on the gay relationships Sassoon had—one with a horrible, selfish Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine), another with decadent aristocrat Stephen Tennent (Calam Lynch), and a brief one with actor Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth), a nice guy Siegfried can’t appreciate. While it is great that Davies has finally come out of the closet in his film life, the lives of the gay men he depicts are sad, hurtful, and not all that interesting—perhaps a reflection of the times, perhaps a reflection of Davies’ own unhappiness and nostalgia for a world of beauty and art that was often only skin deep. Davies indulges in his characteristic film collages and ellipses that make his story both unnecessarily opaque and rather obvious in places, and the embittered Sassoon of the 1950s, played with pained ferocity by Peter Capaldi, is just too loathsome for words. In a strange way, however, Capaldi’s characterization could stand for Britain itself, shattered inside and out by the Great War. While a bit on the nose in this regard, Davies’ final scene—a voiceover recitation of Owen’s brilliant poem, “Disabled,” while the events of the poem are depicted on screen—is powerful, moving, and worth the price of admission. (2022, 137 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS (Germany/Silent)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm

METROPOLIS is the first modern blockbuster, the big-budget big bang, but it clinches that title only owing in part to its visionary grandiosity, its awesome scale, its ribald ridiculousness. The thing that really marks METROPOLIS as the first of its kind is its oppressiveness—the mix of elation and enervation, triumph and trepidation that greets everything from Joseph L. Mankiewicz's CLEOPATRA (1963) to Michael Bay's TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON (2011) to the "Untitled DC Comics Movie" that Warner Bros. has slotted for next year already. Reviewing METROPOLIS in 1927, the young Rudolf Arnheim complained that "[e]ven before its opening, the magazines have stirred us up and tired us out for so long behind the scenes of this film that we now stagger into the theater quite exhausted and apathetic." The flying cars of METROPOLIS have not yet come to fruition, and yet all the social media events of our age—trailer premieres, poster reveals, production blogs, Instagram clues, budgetary gossip, obnoxious hashtags and subtweets—descend directly from the METROPOLIS saturation marketing playbook and seem fully consistent with the film's futurism. More importantly, METROPOLIS serves as the blueprint for the film that's too big to fail—and too vulnerable to offend. It's no secret that the plot of METROPOLIS is an unadorned, incoherent mush that decries class stratification while painting the working class as dull-witted jackanapes who would accidentally drown their offspring if left to their own devices. Like today's blockbusters calibrated for an increasingly globalized audience, METROPOLIS is made for everyone and no one at the same time—it simultaneously flatters and profanes the prejudices of communists, fascists, Christian democrats, New Women, and old men. In other words, it's a mess and one we deserve more with each passing year. Nota bene: when I graduated from Doc Films in 2008, I thought I would be among the last generation of student programmers to fill out a summer calendar with dodgy 16mm prints. In those days, there were still elderly distributors hawking 16mm dupes in printed catalogs, many blissfully (or conveniently) unaware that the GATT treaty had restored the copyright to many of their public domain imports. Borrowing a 16mm print from EmGee or Biograph was almost never a good experience, but it was definitely an experience. This transaction was a living connection to a vanishing (or mostly already vanished) world of non-theatrical 16mm distribution, before VHS, laserdisc, DVD, and comprehensive studio repertory divisions made the whole thing illegible. In the case of METROPOLIS, we have a film that's been restored and reconstructed perhaps more often than any other. Giorgio Moroder's version remains the gold standard, though subsequent efforts took a more scholarly bent. Enno Patalas's decades-long quest to restore METROPOLIS resulted in the 2001 reconstruction (The Gene Siskel Film Center will screening this version --eds.), as well as the 2005 "study version" released on DVD. These restorations build upon previous preservations of drastically truncated editions, including such curios as the Australian release version and Paramount's American cut-down prepared by Channing Pollock. All this culminated in the 2008 discovery of a 16mm duplicate negative in Buenos Aires, which represented the most complete extant version by far. When this restoration met its public in 2010, the acclaim was immense. I dissent—not on account of the quality of the restoration but because the longest version of METROPOLIS is not necessarily the best. The vertiginous graphic energy that predominates in the shorter versions gives way to fully-rounded, tiresomely justified character motivations in the Buenos Aires version. It is the most exhaustive edition of a film that never much rewarded extended contemplation. It was immensely important to finally glimpse what audiences in the first few months of 1927 saw—but we shouldn't slight the shortened versions that audiences studied and canonized for the next eight decades either. Screening as part of the Control.Alt.Delete series presented as part of Science on ScreenⓇ. See the Venue website for announcements about presentations or discussions with science and technology experts. (1927, 124 min, 35mm) [K.A. Westphal]

Vincente Minnelli's MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 2pm

Produced by MGM’s immortal Arthur Freed unit at a time when Technicolor made every shot look like an oil painting come to life, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS would have looked gorgeous even if Vincente Minnelli hadn’t directed it. Yet he did, and the world is a better place as a result. This is the movie (only Minnelli’s third as director) where the former Marshall Field’s window dresser became the American Max Ophüls; the balletic camera movements invoke, alternately, intoxication with rediscovering the past and a skeptical interrogation of the past. Comparably, the dense mise-en-scène is filled with countless little observations about how people lived in a particular time and place (specifically, an upper-middle-class St. Louis neighborhood in 1903-04), and remarkably, the imagery always feels in harmony with the emotional content, which is Chaplinesque in how it can be appreciated by small children and wizened adults for pretty much the same reasons. The onscreen world of MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS was only four decades old when the movie was made, but given that this was during the worst days of World War II, the rosy images of the past probably seemed as distant then as they do today. (Notably, when the characters speak of different nations interacting, they’re talking about the strictly benign spectacle of the coming World’s Fair.) The film continues to triumph as escapist entertainment: Who doesn’t swoon over the exuberance of “The Trolley Song” sequence, grin beamingly at the expertly timed light comedy of the family interaction, or get misty-eyed during Judy Garland’s soulful rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”? Yet what makes MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS endure as art are the countless ways that Minnelli and company complicate their project of escapism. Consider the anecdotal narrative structure, which recognizes the banality and commonness of life in its focus on everyday events; or consider the film’s groundbreaking integration of songs into the story (before MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, the songs in most American musicals were distinctly separate entities from the narratives), which grants unprecedented depth to familiar emotions. These emotions are not always pretty or easily contained—Minnelli generates a surprising amount of anxiety from the Smith family’s impending move, and the scene of Margaret O’Brien’s Tootie taking her anger out on her snowmen is always more unnerving than you expect. Robin Wood once suggested, only half-jokingly, that MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS could be categorized as a horror movie, with Tootie being the monstrous personification of her family members’ repressed emotions, and no less than John Carpenter took inspiration from the Halloween section of the film in his design of the original HALLOWEEN. Apparently, there’s something about the forced perfection of all-American town life that lends itself to the horrific imagination. Screening as part of the Judy Garland Summer Centennial series. (1944, 113 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Walter Lang’s DESK SET (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 2pm

When DESK SET premiered in the late 1950s, computers were a distant bogeyman that generated some anxiety but mostly benign laughter. They were still giant, bumbling, bleeping machines that filled entire rooms and couldn't possibly become ubiquitous. This buoyant, witty romantic office comedy from Walter Lang (director of THE KING AND I and a plethora of bubbly musical comedies) reads quite differently today; it's now enjoyable for the nostalgic charm of how simple and naive our anxieties were, especially when seen from our age of AI and algorithms, which present much more sophisticated and menacing threats to safety, autonomy, and job security. DESK SET is considered one of the lesser Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy pairings, but it still showcases their effervescent and easy onscreen chemistry that was clearly rooted in their offscreen intimacy and familiarity. With a screenplay penned by Phoebe and Henry Ephron (yes, those Ephrons... romcom dynasty!) specifically for Hepburn and Tracy, DESK SET is full of smart, sharp dialogue and fast-paced zingers. Lang has a light touch in adapting the Broadway play to the screen, keeping a two-story office set in place for much of the film, the only Hepburn and Tracy vehicle shot in color and CinemaScope. DESK SET tells the story of four women who work in the reference department of a vaguely-fictionalized CBS, shot at 30 Rockefeller Plaza (the real-life home of NBC). Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, who runs the department, and Joan Blondell delivers a flirtatious and gossipy turn as one of the researchers. As in HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE (1953), another CinemaScope romantic comedy of the era, the four women spend much of the film busily strutting back and forth across the screen as they mine their two-story library to rapidly answer reporter questions for the station—if they don't already have the answers memorized, like entire stanzas of The Song of Hiawatha or exhaustive baseball statistics. Their idyllic work environment is thrown off-kilter by the introduction of Howard Sumner (Spencer Tracy), an industrial engineer who has been secretly hired by the big boss to install two fancy computers in the reference and payroll departments. EMERAC, a giant "electronic brain" that fills the office and physically looms over the anxious librarians, quickly causes concern among the staff that they'll be replaced by machines. As Sumner studies the reference department to map processes and improvements, he can't help but fall for Bunny, who can out-think and out-wit any primitive machine and cut him down to size while she's at it. Bunny's current, underwhelming beau, Mike Cutler (Gig Young), plays a perfect foil to her effortless competence, playing a company VP whose calculated mediocrity relies heavily on her brilliance. Petty jealousies and misunderstandings lead to delightful slapstick and genuine laughter. Hepburn and Tracy's laughter seems very real when they're drunk on champagne in the library and flirting during an epic office holiday party. In addition to providing commentary on the role of technology in modern life, DESK SET benefits from feminist readings of how much hasn't changed in workplace gender roles, including the reliable phone tree of women admins sharing gossip from floor to floor faster than any computer could, and the very different managerial style of Bunny Watson versus Mike Cutler. This breezy comedy remains relatable in the age of Google, when women are still battling for equality in the workplace and we still have no idea what the hell that industrial engineer in our office really does all day. Screening as part of the Control.Alt.Delete series presented as part of Science on ScreenⓇ. See the Venue website for announcements about presentations or discussions with science and technology experts. (1957, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Alex Ensign]

Andrew Bujalski's COMPUTER CHESS (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

COMPUTER CHESS is a triumph of erratic moves: call it a knight’s-tour-de-force. Made at a time when other notable “mumblecore” adherents like the Duplass brothers were starting to venture into more commercial, star-laden territory, Bujalski instead swerved hard in the opposite direction with a formally audacious, thematically arcane period experiment. Set in 1980, when both the homebrew computing movement and Cold War cybernetics were at their apogee, COMPUTER CHESS shrewdly evokes the era through its use of black-and-white vacuum-tube cameras and split-screen video editing effects. No mere gimmick, the choice of medium channels a McLuhan-fueled excitement for new electronic media possibilities, rather than an empty nostalgia for the aesthetics of the past. COMPUTER CHESS initially purports to be a documentary covering a tournament between chess-playing computers, hosted by an avuncular chess master (played by film critic Gerald Peary). Crowded into the windowless conference room of a nondescript Holiday Inn, the human participants—a formidable ensemble of dweebs, academics, and misanthropes—confront the stresses of both advanced technology and basic human interaction. But as soon as the competition gets underway, COMPUTER CHESS starts breaking its own rules, dropping the nonfiction pretense and following odd narrative tangents that cut across a spectrum of pre-Reagan cultural energies. A ghost-in-the-machine mystery plot, played with a lightly ironic touch, careens into new-age encounter groups, Pentagon paranoia and polyamory. What casually emerges, between the awkward hotel-bar conversations, regression therapy sessions and dreamlike interludes featuring elevator-riding cats, is nothing less than a shrewd prehistory of the “California Ideology” that dominates the tech industry today. (It’s easy to see comic figures like Michael Papageorge, a cash-strapped chess hustler indelibly played by Myles George, as a proto-techbro of the Elon Musk variety). For this largely improvisatory exercise, Bujalski cast non-professional actors, many of whom had a background in computers and mathematics; the presence of two Richard Linklater alumni (DAZED AND CONFUSED’s Wiley Wiggins and animator Bob Sabiston of WAKING LIFE) signals COMPUTER CHESS’ kinship with that Austin fixture’s discursive, digressive portraits of American subculture. Linklater’s made his share of period pieces, but as a creatively restless, medium-specific, psychically probing analysis of the recent past, I prefer to think of COMPUTER CHESS as a low-budget, cockeyed counterpart to Paul Thomas Anderson’s THE MASTER (2012) and INHERENT VICE (2014). Screening as part of the Control.Alt.Delete series presented as part of Science on ScreenⓇ. See the Venue website for announcements about presentations or discussions with science and technology experts. (2013, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Metzger]

Salome Chasnoff's CODE OF THE FREAKS (US/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 8pm

Chicago-based filmmaker Salome Chasnoff and writer-interviewees Susan Nussbaum, Alyson Patsavas, and Carrie Sandah did the world a favor by creating this breezy and informative 69-minute documentary about the depiction—and frequent misrepresentation—of people with physical and/or mental disabilities in narrative cinema. Utilizing film clips spanning nearly 100 years, from Robert Wiene's THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI in 1920 through to Hollywood movies in the 21st century, CODE OF THE FREAKS provides a welcome corrective to the myriad, dangerous distortions and falsehoods offered by depictions of the differently abled in cinema‚ almost none of which were made by filmmakers who were actually disabled themselves. The most provocative aspect of CODE OF THE FREAKS (the title of which affectionately nods to Tod Browning's 1932 masterpiece FREAKS) may be the way it illustrates how narrative cinema's need for traditional "resolution" does a particular disservice to stories centering on disabled characters by providing the same few tidy endings over and over again (i.e., the "miracle cure," death, and institutionalization). But, in spite of the seriousness of the subject matter, most of the disabled artists and activists interviewed for Chasnoff's camera come across as witty and good-humored, and the director herself gets a surprising amount of comic mileage out of the way she juxtaposes these interview clips with relevant film scenes (a case in point: disability advocate Candace Coleman's balking at the subtext of M. Night Shyamalan's UNBREAKABLE followed by a shot from that movie where Samuel L. Jackson's character says "No!" half a dozen times). Even better is the way Chasnoff creates clever montages incorporating a range of different films about disability in order to show how pervasive some of the most unfortunate tropes are (e.g., the way a disabled character's highest function seems to be to serve merely as an inspiration for non-disabled characters; or the absurd frequency of scenes in which blind men are able to successfully drive cars as a means of reclaiming the masculinity that disability has otherwise threatened to take away from them). Screening as part of the Midwest Film Festival. The event will begin at 7pm with a social hour, followed by an 8pm screening and a Q&A with Chasnoff and members of the production team. (2020, 69 minutes, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Vincente Minnelli's THE CLOCK (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 6pm

THE CLOCK is one of the great Hollywood movie romances, a film that simply exudes amorousness—to watch it is to fall in love with the leads as they fall in love with each other. The story is simple: an Army corporal (Robert Walker) on a 48-hour leave in New York City meets an office worker (Judy Garland) in Penn Station. He convinces her to show him around town, and over the course of their time together, love blossoms. Though the film was shot at MGM Studios, THE CLOCK is nonetheless one of the supreme urban love stories; like SUNRISE (1927) before it and THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE (1991) much later, it depicts the city as a giant playground for lovers, with the various sights and thoroughfares opening up worlds of possibility in the city at large and between the two protagonists. For me, the loveliest sequence takes place at night, when Walker and Garland meet a milkman at a bar and ultimately have to take over his route: it’s a poignant metaphor for how love inspires responsibility, with the delivery of milk alluding to the domestic life the film’s lovers imagine themselves sharing one day. The movie isn’t a musical, despite the involvement of Garland, director Vincente Minnelli, and producer Arthur Freed (who collaborated the previous year on MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS), yet it’s the sort of film in which you expect people to start singing at any time—the world it creates is just that lyrical and exuberant. Minnelli’s direction is particularly musical, as he executes plenty of the balletic camera movements for which he was renowned; he also makes his leads seem radiant. THE CLOCK was made around the time Minnelli and Garland got married, and the star wholly earns the attention the director’s camera bestows upon her with a performance of disarming sincerity. One reason for Garland’s enduring appeal lies in the way her deep vulnerability as an individual complicated her assurance as a performer; this quality is a particular asset to THE CLOCK, as one feels Garland’s need to be loved in her interactions with Walker, not to mention her wrenching anxiety when she’s unexpectedly separated from him. The film’s climax is one of the most emotional passages in Minnelli’s filmography, a sequence of such powerful heartache that it borders on existential dread. Screening as part of the Judy Garland Summer Centennial series. (1945, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT (US/UK)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 9pm

Seen in any version (there are at least seven), BLADE RUNNER is a monstrous mess—a mélange of film noir, Philip K. Dick, action-heavy cineplex sadism, and horny chinoiserie. A critically derided flop on its initial release, BLADE RUNNER carries the uncanny suggestion that its story not only revolves around androids, but may actually have been conceived and shaped by non-human intelligence—a quality it shares with that other misunderstood Summer of '82 sci-fi spectacular, TRON. When viewed alongside director Ridley Scott's prior effort, the masterfully controlled and minutely calibrated terror show ALIEN, BLADE RUNNER feels programmatic and kludgy, as if all decisions about staging, atmospherics, and rhythm were simply fed into an overheated circuit board. (The original ending—an improbably sunny coda repurposed from second-unit outtakes from THE SHINING—plays like the product of an inelegant Surefire BoxOffice algorithm.) It's not so much that art direction, set design, cinematography, editing, music, and acting are working at cross-purposes—instead, they're merely zipping along semi-autonomously, without being shaped into a grammatical whole. So, it's odd and kind of touching that Ridley Scott has repeatedly re-asserted his authorship of this unruly, seemingly author-less masterwork—first in a hastily produced 'Director's Cut' in 1992, subsequently in a "Final Cut" released in 2007. (If Scott follows Oliver Stone's example with ALEXANDER, the "Final Cut" need not really be final; there's always the promise of an "Ultimate Cut" peeking out over the smoggy horizon.) It now takes on the impossible grandeur of a medieval saga, a lumbering epic embroidered and corrupted by countless textual variants. Most of the major changes were performed for the so-called Director's Cut: Harrison Ford's sleepy voice-over is gone, an origami unicorn rhymes with and undercuts a re-inserted dream sequence, and the freak ending is excised. The Final Cut, by contrast, services superfans, correcting gaffes imperceptible to the uninitiated: matte lines are cleaned up, lip sync is fixed with lines re-dubbed by Ford's son, Joanna Cassidy's face is digitally plastered over the body of a stunt double, Rutger Hauer treats his father more decorously. I still prefer the original 1982 theatrical cut above all others—it really heightens the contradictions, as the student Marxists used to say. But the Final Cut is still queer and ungainly enough to slosh around in. Screening as part of the Control.Alt.Delete series presented as part of Science on ScreenⓇ. See the Venue website for announcements about presentations or discussions with science and technology experts. (1982/2007, 117 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

Chloe Okuno’s WATCHER (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

When two similar films are released almost simultaneously, their differences can be instructive. Alex Garland’s MEN and WATCHER both present a vision of a world where women navigate daily life as a string of microaggressions committed by men. While MEN is an A24 release, WATCHER has an “I can’t believe it’s not A24” air, with its languid pacing (no violence is committed onscreen till the end), emphasis on atmosphere, and dark cinematography. But if MEN is “surreal” and “dark” in an easily consumable manner, with a simplistic view of the differences between men and women, then WATCHER offers something creepier and more nuanced. It benefits from its central premise: an American woman, Julia (Maika Monroe), has moved to Bucharest with her husband Francis (Karl Gusman) so he can work there. A Romanian-American, he speaks the language, but she does not, so she relies on him during her interactions. When a cab driver speaks in Romanian about her, he initially translates it as “He hates you,” then says he was joking and amends the remark to “He thinks you’re beautiful.” But how can she tell what the driver—and other Romanian speakers—really think about her? Meanwhile, women in Bucharest are being hunted by a serial killer known as the Spider. Julia becomes suspicious of her neighbor Weber (Burn Gorman), accusing him of peeping on her through his window and following her around a movie theater and grocery store, though she has little proof of his intentions. Chloe Okuno frames her actors in large, sterile spaces that dwarf them. If the first half of WATCHER takes place in a representation of our world, the direction grows increasingly stylized as it ramps up the menace. COVID restrictions contributed to a vision of isolated people in a de-populated city, suggesting the Venice of DON’T LOOK NOW and the menacing Italian cities of ‘70s gialli. Okuno’s direction also brings out the spectator’s own voyeurism. A lengthy shot zooms out very slowly from Julia and Francis’ bedroom as they have sex, placing us in the position of a peeping tom. Throughout, her choice of camera angles presents cinema as a reflection of hostility towards women; it’s no coincidence that Julia used to be an actor. (2022, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Steve Erickson]

Mamoru Oshii’s GHOST IN THE SHELL (Japan)

Facets Cinema – Friday, 7:30pm

Through miles and miles of cables, an unfathomable amount of data is created every day, and the horizon is plastered with copy-and-pasted skyscrapers looming silently above. It's 2029 Japan, and life is getting more complex every day. Take our main character: Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg public-security agent who ponders her identity in between chasing criminals. She’s not only concerned about what she is but also why she is. It's explained she has some sort of brain despite her body having been manufactured by a tech company, but her enhanced strength and senses come at the cost of knowing who she was or even if she was. It's all a bit confusing, frankly—the philosophical dialogue is delivered quickly and can be a bit dense—however, it works perfectly. Mamoru Oshii gets how our minds and bodies are constantly overloaded with work demands, social media blasts, food cravings, car horns, gunshots, and so on. But he offers brief reprieves from all this, like when Motoko takes a serene dip in the water outside the city despite the potential damage she could cause to her “shell.” The film takes such detours between action set pieces and heavy text; in other films, it could all get tiresome, but in this one, the pacing is perfect. The animation is no joke either—every scene is meticulously designed to create something particularly spectacular. After she gets embroiled in a case teeming with mystery and political intrigue, Motoko finds herself down a path that could help answer the questions plaguing her. She may be trapped in a system programming her purpose, but the virus of rebellion propagates slowly, perhaps even offering some sense of freedom. (1995, 83 mins, Digital Projection) [Drew Van Weelden]

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (US)

Facets Cinema and the Wilmette Theatre (1122 Central Ave., Wilmette) – See Venue websites for showtimes

Nobody’s life is perfect, but the Wang family’s is more or less in meltdown. The coin-op laundry they run is failing and being audited by the IRS, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), are battling all of the time, Evelyn’s sickly father (James Hong) has one foot in eternity, and Evelyn’s husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), is filing for divorce in hopes of getting Evelyn to face their problems and work things out. The title of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s 1961 musical, Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, might come to mind, as it did when screenwriter-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert inserted a snippet of the play in their wacky cinematic fantasia, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. In their fertile imaginations, the term “multiverse” escapes the banalities of comic book movies and plops into an infinitely more entertaining wuxia setting, with the queen of wuxia, Michelle Yeoh, learning how to save the multiverse from the threat of—her daughter. The imagination that went into creating the various universes in which Evelyn plays various roles—among them a movie star, a Chinese opera star, a tabletop grill chef, a lesbian with sausage fingers who uses her feet for most things—is mind-boggling. The mechanics of operating across universes are logical, simple, and incredibly funny. And the cast, including an almost-unrecognizable Jamie Lee Curtis as tax auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdre, all perform their fast-changing identities with perfect comic timing and grace. The lessons of the movie are really quite simple—value and honor family ties, most things are manageable if you put them in perspective, people will surprise you if given half the chance. The quick edits and the quick wits of Kwan, Scheinert, and company elevate this to a thoroughly joyful ride. (2022, 139 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

⚫ The Big Teeth Small Shorts Film Festival
The semi-annual Big Teeth Small Shorts Film Festival takes place on Thursday at the Burning Bush Brewery (4014 N. Rockwell St.). Doors open at 7:30pm, film screenings begin between 8-8:30pm. The festival celebrates short films under five minutes in length, with over 35 films included in the program. Get $5 off tickets purchased in advance with code Cinefile5off. Purchase tickets and learn more here.

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
“Through the Looking Glass: Reflecting the World Around Us,” the two-night NU MFA Doc Media Thesis Showcase, starts on Thursday at 7pm, with films by Yanyi Xie, Nely Montina, Mbayi Aben, and Alicia Soller. Free admission. The second night takes place on Friday at 7pm and will be included on next week’s list. More info here.

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Jorge Michel Grau’s 2019 Mexican film PERDIDA (106 min, Digital Projection) screens on Tuesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago History Museum (1601 N. Clark St.). Free admission with online registration. More info here.

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station
Charles Roxburgh’s 2012 film DON’T LET THE RIVERBEAST GET YOU! (99 min, Digital Projection) screens on Wednesday at 8pm. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ The Davis Theater
Gaspar Noé’s 2022 film VORTEX (144 min, DCP Digital) screens on Monday and Tuesday at 7pm, programmed by local filmmaker Joe Swanberg. More info on these special screenings here.

⚫ Facets Cinema
Mamoru Oshii’s 1985 film ANGEL’S EGG (71 min, Digital Projection) screens on Friday at 9:30pm, following a screening of Oshii’s GHOST IN THE SHELL (see review above) as part of the Anime Auteurs series. 

The Facets Summer Pop-Up Market and Warehouse Sale takes place on Saturday from 10am to 4pm. More info on all screenings and events here. 

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Jonas Carpignano’s 2022 French-Italian co-production A CHIARA (121 min, DCP Digital) begins this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Robert Wise's 1951 sci-fi classic THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (92 min, 35mm) screens on Friday at 6pm as part of the Control.Alt.Delete series presented as part of Science on ScreenⓇ.

Steve James’ 1994 documentary HOOP DREAMS (171 min, DCP Digital) screens on Monday at 6pm as part of 50/50, the year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. James in person to introduce the screening. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
The Music Box Garden Movies series continues. See Venue website for list of films screening and showtimes.

Alex Garland’s 2022 horror film MEN (100 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes. 

PRINCE: SIGN O’ THE TIMES (1987, 87 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday and Saturday at midnight.

Ryan Ferguson’s 2022 documentary SKATE OR DIE (85 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday at 4:15pm. Cast and crew in attendance for a post-screening discussion including Chicago skateboard legend Stevie Dread Snyder and moderated by WBEZ Chicago Public Radio criminal justice reporter Patrick Smith.

Beeban Kidron’s 1995 cult classic TO WONG FOO, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING! JULIE NEWMAR (109 min, 35mm) screens on Thursday at 9:45pm. Presented by Ramona Slick and Rated Q - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema, with themed pre-show drinks and a DJ set in the Music Box Lounge at 9pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ South Side Home Movie Project
The South Side Home Movie Project is participating in the Key/Change exhibition at the Weinberg/Newton Gallery (688 N. Milwaukee Ave.), ongoing through July 16. The exhibition centers on housing; per the event description, “silent home movies and idiosyncratic sculpture subsequently suggest that housing is a productive place in which intimate moments, lifelong memories, and nurturing meals are made and shared.” More info here.

🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS

Sergei Loznitsa’s DONBASS (Ukraine)

Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here

DONBASS is acutely aware of its existence as a thoroughly partial, mediated depiction of war in the east of Ukraine. The opening scene shows a woman having makeup applied, followed by another woman directing a cast of extras to run outside as a fake explosion goes off. The director’s commands have a military ring; like a drill sergeant, she shouts, “Follow my orders! Get a move on!” Is this a vision of the making of DONBASS itself? Only when the film’s final scenes return to the makeup trailer does the audience get a firm grip on the level of reality at work. DONBASS looks upon journalism as the most insidious version of fiction, showing camera crews shoot repeated takes and change camera angles to get traumatized people to play the most convincing versions of themselves. Since DONBASS is a narrative film, it feels freer than Loznitsa's documentaries to engage with our “post-truth” world. It's composed of 13 segments, sometimes connected by recurring characters, each introduced by an onscreen title relating the location. A woman accused of taking bribes barges into a meeting to dump a bucket of shit over a politician’s head. In the next scene, nurses protest the hoarding of food, medicine, and diapers in the hospital where they work while a slimy suit lies to them. Loznitsa risks caricaturing the separatists: for example, a scene where a helpless old man is crowded and beaten by young men would play quite differently if he were a macho soldier capable of fighting back or if we saw the graphic effects of the landmines he’s accused of planting. (The film features a great deal of onscreen cruelty but no gore.) Even in scenes with no physical threats, bullying is constant, as are people on opposing sides speaking at cross purposes. The fact that almost no characters are given names enhances the mood of dehumanization. Loznitsa mixes long takes (with the final scene taking this style to its limit) with cramped widescreen framings of crowds. DONBASS feels rooted in the dark satire and pissed-off mood of Vera Chytilova or Kira Muratova’s late films. The end offers no respite, just a withdrawal into a bird’s eye view of the media’s exploitation of terror that hints at an indictment of DONBASS itself. (2018, 121 min) [Steve Erickson] 

🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
ALSO SCREENING/STREAMING

⚫ Video Data Bank
“Spring with Mike Kuchar” is available to stream for free on VDB TV. The program includes Kuchar’s SUNLIT SORCERY (2022, 34 min), composed of his works ECHO’S GARDEN (2010), A MIDSUMMER’S NIGHTMARE (2008) and THE VERNAL ZONE (2008), and Oscar Oldershaw’s AN AFTERNOON WITH MIKE KUCHAR (2014, 32 min). More info here.

CINE-LIST: June 3 - June 9, 2022

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, Alex Ensign, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Metzger, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden, K.A. Westphal