CRUCIAL VIEWING
Mikio Naruse's FLOWING (Japanese
Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Monday, 7pm
Inspired, like Kenji Mizoguchi's contemporaneous STREET OF SHAME, by
the Japanese government's decision to criminalize organized prostitution
in 1956, this candid ensemble drama is set around a declining geisha
house. A cast of acting heavyweights—including Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu
Yamada, and Haruko Sugimura—play the women whose livelihoods depend
on this fading business, which in turn depends on a fading way of life;
Naruse's vision is anything but sentimental, suggesting that the characters
are as hopeless and worthless in the new, "progressive" society
as they were in the outmoded system of values it was created to replace.
Though for the most part Naruse sticks with perspective of a middle-aged
maid (Tanaka) who takes a job at the geisha house, it's the director's
muse, Hideko Takamine—playing the part of the madam's "modern"
daughter—who truly represents the film's outlook: a character with
no place in the old world and no chance in the new one. (1956, 117 min,
35mm) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Radical Light: Stories Untold (Experimental Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
— Thursday, 7pm
Touring through Chicago in February,
the Radical Light series is a fantastically entertaining overview
of the Bay Area alternative film and video scene from 1945-2000. This
first sampling at Block Cinema features innovative, clever, and unhinged
storytelling that serves as a great primer for the more challenging
titles to come. James Broughton's THE BED (1968) is a playful, earthy
classic featuring various combinations of nudes interacting with the
titular object in a field. The frequently bawdy Curt McDowell provokes
with the audio-only American Midwest satire A VISIT TO INDIANA (1970).
The recently-deceased underground filmmaking legend George Kuchar creates
an even-more-delirious-than-normal slap-dash drama in the classic A
REASON TO LIVE (1976). Scott Stark's sardonic I'LL WALK WITH GOD (1994)
uses airline emergency instruction cards to create a story of the airline
stewardess's transcendence. Also in this program are the video works
DEADLINE (1981) by Max Almy, EASY LIVING (1984) by Chip Lord and Mickey
McGowan, and ALL SMILES AND SADNESS (1999) by Anne McGuire. The series
continues at Conversations at the Edge on the 16th and Chicago Filmmakers
on the 24th. (1968-99, 100 min total, 16mm and Video Projection)
JM
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
Robert Bresson's LES ANGES DU PÉCHÉ and
LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE (French Revivals)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 6pm and Saturday, 4:45pm (Anges) and
Saturday, 3pm and Monday, 6:15pm (Dames)
Despite—or because of—its overtly religious subject matter, Robert
Bresson's "conventional" first feature LES ANGES DU PÉCHÉ—about
an order of nuns who specialize in looking after female ex-cons—is
the one (aside from, of course, his debut short, PUBLIC AFFAIRS) that
most thoroughly hints at his Surrealist roots. Made before Bresson started
putting his theories about editing, framing and acting into practice,
the film has a style that's essentially syncretic, repurposing "mainstream"
(or "mainstream at the time") ideas about how a camera should
move, how a film should be edited, how actors should perform, and how
a story should be told toward its own ends; it teeters somewhere between
reverence and absurdism, with Bresson interjecting the melodramatic
plot with scenes of nuns scurrying around at night, nuns hiding in shadows,
nuns arguing—their hoods always comically flapping in the wind. From
PUBLIC AFFAIRS through L'ARGENT, Bresson displayed a generally ironic
stance toward human behavior and socially hierarchies—regardless of
what you've heard, this is no different. (1943, 96 min, 35mm) IV
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Bresson's last film featuring trained
actors and his last before his legendary period of stylistic radicalism
extending across the 50s and 60s, LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE combines the fussy fatalism of Jean Cocteau's implausible screenplay
(based on a story from Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste et Son Maître)
with a preview of Bressonian things to come: understated line delivery,
extended fade-outs, and distinctive, poetic framings. The narrative
involves an subtly insidious plot by one ex-lover (Maria Casarés) against
another (Paul Bernard) in their relation with the young prostitute Agnès
(Elina Labourdette); filmed over an extended period in Vichy France,
one struggles to read the film as a political allegory: perhaps one
should consider the isolating confinement of Agnès and her mother in
their apartment, or the pervasive romantic pessimism (love here seems
not just impossible but a contributing source of detached anguish).
Alternatively, if one takes into account an intriguing biographical
curiosity—Bresson's reputed former career as a gigolo in his youth—LES
DAMES could be approached as the most personal film of a most impersonal
auteur. (1945, 86 min, 35mm) MC
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Andrei Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR (Soviet
Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 8pm and Tuesday, 6pm
Long before the great TREE OF LIFE
euphoria of 2011, another film (from another director's famously sparse
oeuvre) went off uncharted into the space between memories past and
present, mapping onto them a universal significance. Andrei Tarkovsky's
THE MIRROR may lack dinosaurs and metaphorical doors in the desert,
but it does set a mean precedent for everything a passion project can
be when an auteur is working on such an intensely personal level. Long
a dream project of Tarkovsky's, it was only in the wake of SOLARIS that
he was able to secure funding, and armed with a meager allotment of
film stock, he began production in late 1973. Given the non-linear,
dreamlike progression of the film, such obstacles aren't hard to comprehend,
and they perhaps explain why this is his most fleeting film outside
his debut, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD. Drawn across the middle of the 20th century, THE MIRROR takes a stream of consciousness
journey through familial memories, with actors in dual roles as father
and son, as wife and mother. Woven in are poems penned by Tarkovsky's
own father, assorted clips of wartime newsreel footage, and the quiet,
ethereal imagery characteristic of all his films. It all makes for a
hazy dream of cinema, one from which you tragically wake too early.
But lest the length should fool you, this is not Tarkovsky for beginners.
No surprise that at his most personal, he's also at his most esoteric,
so an afternoon spent with one of his aforementioned films would be
a good primer. As for those already in his thrall, this is imperative
viewing. SAIC professor and filmmaker Dan Eisenberg lectures at the
Tuesday screening. (1974, 108 min, 35mm) TJ
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Everything is Terrible's DOGGIEWOGGIEZ
POOCHIEWOOCHIEZ
(New Experimental)
Lincoln Hall (2424 N. Lincoln Avenue) — Friday, 10pm
The avant-comedy found footage collective Everything is Terrible
outdo themselves on their third feature, an hour-long psychedelic montage
patterned on Alejandro Jodorowsky's THE HOLY MOUNTAIN. In lesser hands,
the subject (uh, dogs) and methods (layering out-of-context moments
from a wide variety of cheesy TV shows, movies, and instructional tapes)
would have produced little more than an ironic pop-culture mash-up,
but EIT's eye for the darker undercurrents in the material yields an
onslaught of images that is as creepy, accusatory, and sociological
(one bravura sequence catalogues various racial / ethnic identities
assigned to talking dogs in kids' movies over the decades; check out
as the canines go from being predominantly black to predominantly Hispanic)
as it is funny. Jon Voight's climactic fight scene from Bob Clark-directed KARATE
DOG
serves as a sort of leitmotif. (2012, 55 min, Digital Projection)
IV
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More info at www.everythingisterrible.com.
ALSO RECOMMENDED Sergei Eisenstein's IVAN THE TERRIBLE
PARTS I and II (Soviet Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Sunday, 3pm (Part I) and 5pm (Part II) and
Wednesday, 6:15pm (Part I) and 8:15pm (Part II)
Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished historical epic is dense, intense,
strange, slightly deranged, and, at times, genuinely scary. The subject
is ostensibly the founding of the Russian Empire, but Eisenstein packs
the film is so tightly with paranoia, symbolism, political allusions,
mannerist visuals, over-the-top performances, and psychosexual undertones
that the overall impression is more heady nightmare than costume drama.
Planned as a trilogy, the project was only two-thirds finished when
Eisenstein died in 1948; nonetheless, the two completed parts constitute
an inexhaustible, idiosyncratic masterpiece. (PART I: 1944, 96 min,
35mm; PART II: 1946, 90 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
John Francis Dillon's CALL HER SAVAGE
(American Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Saturday, 2pm
Clara Bow hurls herself headlong into
her penultimate Hollywood film, in which her semi-autobiographical character—an
irrepressible and troubled urban socialite with a Brooklyn accent—gets
thrown off a horse, playfully bullwhips an Indian, and wrestles a mastiff
to the floor in her first few minutes of screen time. The lurid plotline
(ultimately conflating the outrageous behavior of lascivious flappers
with the purported savagery of Native Americans) is mere window dressing
for scene after scene of over-the-top, pre-Code campy dissonance—shifting
from cocktail party catfights to melodramatic tenement blazes to anarchist
nightclubs complete with pansy performers (which Bow inexplicably punches
her way out of). A serious rarity on home video (with only washed-out
TCM dubs circulating), the only appropriate way to watch CALL HER SAVAGE
is on celluloid with an enlightened crowd of college kids and old-timers
anyway. (1932, 87 min, 35mm) MC
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
Orson Welles' F FOR FAKE (Documentary/Essay
Film Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Friday, 7pm
One of the greatest accomplishments
of Orson Welles' later period, the documentary/essay film/metafiction
F FOR FAKE exists in a category all its own. The organizing subject
is forgery, as it plays out in the worlds of art and culture. The figures
studied by the film include the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory; Clifford
Irving, a journalist infamous for falsifying his stories; and, in some
eloquent moments of autobiography, Welles himself. The breathtaking
editing design, which builds poetic rhymes and ironies out of the various
components, feels at least two decades ahead of its time; the implications
created by the juxtapositions (often made between reality and illusion)
are consistently profound. As Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote for the Criterion
Collection release, "As Finnegans Wake was for Joyce, F
FOR FAKE was for Welles a playful repository of public history intertwined
with private in-jokes as well as duplicitous meanings, an elaborate
blend of sense and nonsense that carries us along regardless of what's
actually being said. For someone whose public and private identities
became so separate that they wound up operating routinely in separate
households and sometimes on separate continents, exposure and concealment
sometimes figured as reverse sides of the same coin, and Welles's desire
to hide inside his own text here becomes a special kind of narcissism." (1975, 87 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
Bauhaus Media Art Program (Experimental
Revival)
Goethe Institut (150 N. Michigan
Ave., Ste. 200) — Thursday, 6pm
While this is a rare opportunity to
see a number of never-screened works from the Bauhaus movement, it's
also a case where the show may be best suited to experimental film aficionados
and Bauhaus fans. The work is fascinating, but spare and slow. Focused
on the mostly purely abstract films from the movement, the selection
includes works made during the height of the Bauhaus movement proper
and several works conceived of during the 1920s and 30s but only realized
decades later. Besides the much better known ringer films by Hans Richter
(RHYTHM 21 and RHYTHM 23) and Viking Eggeling (DIAGONAL SYMPHONY)—both
of whom were tangentially involved with Bauhaus—the bulk of the program
is work by students of the movement rather than Moholy-Nagy or Gropius.
Films by Werner Graeff, Heinrich Brocksieper, Kurt Kranz, and an excerpt
of a 1967 film by Rudolf Judes of artist Kurt Schwerdtfeger's 1920's
light sculpture REFLECTING COLOUR-LIGHT-PLAY all evince the simple geometry
and forms found in the Bauhaus style. For those who are interested in
the early abstract work of Richter, Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Harry
Smith, and others, this is a valuable look at a relatively forgotten
side of one of the great art and design movements of the 20th century.
(1923-72, approx. 76 min total, DVD Projection) PF
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More info here.
Allan Arkush's ROCK N' ROLL HIGH
SCHOOL (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 9:15pm
Among schlock mogul Roger Corman's
countless contributions to humanity, I most cherish this vision of a
late 70s alternative universe where punk rock founding fathers the Ramones
are teen heartthrobs bigger than the Bee Gees or Peter Frampton. Allan
Arkush and Joe Dante took a sexploitation script titled "Girl's Gym"
(written by future film scholar Joseph McBride) and nimbly persuaded
Corman to give it a punk edge instead of tapping into the disco craze.
Possibly the most anarchically inventive school flick since ZERO DE
CONDUITE, there's an anything-for-a-laugh spirit fueled by Dante's cartoon
zaniness, as well as gags supplied by the Zucker brothers of
AIRPLANE!/NAKED GUN fame. It's all
wrapped under a 50s B-movie vibe that fits perfectly with the Ramones'
retrocore aesthetic, though it lacks the band's airtight execution.
But the band more than compensates with one of the most electrifying
sets caught on celluloid, shredding through "Blitzkrieg Bop," "Teenage
Lobotomy," "California Sun" and "Pinhead" with breathtaking
ferocity. (If you go to Doc, be sure to honor the memory of Joey, Johnny
and Dee Dee by dancing your ass off during this sequence—you won't
find it difficult.) Starring the irrepressible P.J. Soles as the Ramones'
#1 fan, with ex-Warhol Factory Girl Mary Woronov as the fascist butch
principal and Ron Howard's little brother Clint demonstrating various
techniques for unhooking bra straps. (1979, 93 min, 35mm) KBL
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Lisa Cholodenko's THE KIDS ARE ALL
RIGHT (Contemporary American Revival)
Chicago History Museum — Saturday
(call CHM for exact showtime)
THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT's cast is near-perfect, giving its story
about a modern dysfunctional family comprised of two lesbian parents
(Annette Bening and Julianne Moore), their maturing children (Mia Wasikowska
and Josh Hutcherson), and the kids' sperm-donor father (Mark Ruffalo)
a deftness that hits the screenplay's notes with an emotional accuracy
and honesty that makes comparable family dramas seem clunky. Cholodenko,
a lesbian herself, has a keen understanding of her characters and a
compassion for them that shines through, even when they're compromising
their lives. Her sensitivity to the dynamics of a family are as good
as any director's, making the fact that the parents are gay—a fact
here, but a contentious topic in America—seem incidental, her most
radical move yet. (2010, 105 min, DVD Projection) KH
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More info at www.chicagohs.org.
Michael Powell's AGE OF CONSENT
(British Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Sunday, 7pm
Seasonal affective disorder got you down? Want to be transported
to an idyllic, summery setting but loathe George Clooney? Michael Powell's
AGE OF CONSENT might just be the solution. Taking place on a sun-drenched
Australian island, the film centers on Bradley Morahan (James Mason),
a painter disillusioned with the New York art racket who escapes to
his native homeland for a Thoreauvian sojourn. Initially horrified to
learn that he's not the only resident of the island, he eventually befriends
Cora (Helen Mirren in her first major film role), a wet behind the ears
Lolita-type who has aspirations of becoming a hairdresser in Brisbane.
An artist-muse relationship quickly develops, which would provide a
healthy dose of sexual tension if Bradley wasn't completely oblivious
to Cora's ulterior interests. His complete fixation with his paintings
touches on one of the most prevailing themes of cinema: the reproduction
taking precedence over the original. Comic relief is provided by the
brilliant character actor Jack MacGowran (most well known for his Beckett
roles), who plays Bradley's philandering cheapskate friend. Despite
the comedic energy MacGowran brings to the film, the problem with AGE
OF CONSENT is that it never adopts a proper identity. Is it sophisticated
pornography masquerading as an art film? An absurdist sex comedy complete
with a random murder? A promotional video for the Great Barrier Reef?
Despite its capricious nature, the film sure does look pretty—its stunning
underwater sequences rival those found in THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE
ZIZZOU. Like many of the films featured in Doc's "Always Crashing
in the Same Car" series, AGE OF CONSENT ends on an abrupt, ambiguous
note, but unlike KES or DEEP END, its hardly thought provoking; instead,
prepare yourselves for one of the most awkward fulfillments of unrequited
desire ever captured on film. (1969, 103 min, 35mm) HS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Pedro Almodóvar's THE SKIN I LIVE
IN (New Spanish)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Check
Venue website for showtimes
The key themes and organizing principles
of Pedro Almodóvar's career get their clearest expression in this superbly-crafted
and somewhat crazy sci-fi revenge thriller about a plastic surgeon (Antonio
Banderas, in what just might be his finest performance) who keeps a
patient (Elena Anaya) prisoner in his mansion. Almodóvar's pièce de
résistance is a central twist that completely redefines both characters,
and, in the process, re-configures the creepy narrative as a (surprisingly
moving) treatise on gender, sexuality, and identity. Essential, unsettling,
and more or less a masterpiece. (2011, 117 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Ridley Scott's ALIEN
— THE DIRECTOR'S CUT (American Revival)
Music Box — Friday and Saturday, Midnight
The history of horror films in America
is basically a history of self-reflexive cultural negotiations regarding
the appropriate monstrous representation of sublimated, dead labor (from
industrial-era vampires to post-industrial/consumerist zombies, for
example). The serial killer, in particular, is a monster born of the
late 1970s, a time of increased independence and employment for women,
as well as of increased corporate diversification. Emblematic here is
Ridley Scott's ALIEN, in which a crew of highly-skilled co-ed journeyman
space-laborers for the (presumably monopolistic) "Company"
are obliged by their weak contracts into dangerous, unpaid overtime
work exploring a nearby crashed spacecraft—resulting in one worker's
being literally raped by an articulated organism of unknown origin.
Left in a coma, his body immobilized by a unremovable death grip to
the face—also known as your cubicle's computer screen—this employee
violently gives birth to the titular illegitimate xenomorphic slasher,
an outrageous H.R. Giger creation best described as a toothed vagina
on a penis inside a toothed vagina on a penis. Its savage hypersexuality
is in striking contrast to the celibate and demoralized crew, who in
turn discover (as we all someday must) that their employer—mediated
by a bureaucratic artificial intelligence system—considers them essentially
disposable in the face of true biomechanistic innovation. ALIEN's innovative,
languorously developed, and politically relevant narrative structure
is also accompanied by simultaneously punishing and dazzling sound-effects
work, romanticizing the harsh interstellar environment with a progressively
intense and surprisingly passionate lullaby of humming, clicking, whirring,
dripping, hissing, and shrieking noises. (1979, 119 min, 35mm) MC
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Chicago Film Seminar event
this month is by Noa Steimatsky (University of Chicago) who will
present the talk Death at Work: Barthes and Warhol Look at the Face.
The respondent is Scott Durham (Northwestern University). It's at SAIC
(112 S. Michigan Ave., Rm. 1307) on Thursday at 6:30pm.
I Am Logan Square Gallery (2644
N. Milwaukee Ave.) opens the exhibition Film Is Dead: Edges Of The
Digital Frame on Thursday with a reception from 6-8:30pm. The show,
which runs through February 29, features video works by Nelson Carvajal
and Amir George.
DePaul University presents local
filmmaker Joe Swanberg in person with his new film Silver
Bullets on Friday at 6pm. It's at the CDM Theater (Daley Building,
243 S. Wabash Ave., lower level). More info here. http://my.cdm.depaul.edu/news/calendar_mycti.asp?id=5086
The Whistler (2421 N. Milwaukee
Ave.) presents the "Odd Obsession Forgeign Films Series" with René
Laloux's cult French animated feature FANTASTIC PLANET (DVD Projection). It's on Saturday at 9pm.
Transistor (3819 N. Lincoln
Ave.) screens the Linda Williams and Raul Zaritsky's 1981 documentary
MAXWELL STREET BLUES on Monday at 8pm. Introduced by Facets Multimedia's
Susan Doll. DVD projection.
The Northwest Chicago Film Society
(at the Portage Theater) screens Gregory La Cava's 1926 W.C. Fields
silent SO'S YOUR OLD MAN (restored 35mm print) on Wednesday at
7:30pm. It is preceded by the 1925 Leo McCarey short HIS WOODEN WEDDING
(16mm). Both are accompanied by Jay Warren on organ.
Chicago Filmmakers
screens Best of Ottawa International Animation Festival 2011 (Video Projection) on Friday at 8pm. Included are 12 SKETCHES ON THE
IMPOSSIBILITY OF BEING STILL (Magali Charrier, UK), HARU NO SHIKUMI
(THE MECHANISM OF SPRING) (Atsushi Wada, Japan), THE RENTER (Jason Carpenter,
US), JOYZ 'ELECTROPIA' (Noriko Okaku, UK/Japan), BLANCHE FRAISE (Frédérick
Tremblay, Canada), I'M FINE THANKS (Eamonn O'Neill, UK), DET SISTE NORSKE
TROLLET (THE LAST NORWEGIAN TROLL) (Pjotr Sapegin, Norway), MOXIE (Stephen
Irwin, UK), and THE GOAT AND THE WELL (Ben Cady, UK).
The Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) screens Sylvain Chomet's 2010 animated film
THE ILLUSIONIST (35mm) on Friday at 7pm. The RSVP list is full for
this event, but you can still show up to get on a wait list.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Fernando León de Aranoa's 2010 Spanish film AMADOR (35mm) plays for a week; Rachel Libert and Tony Hardmon's 2011 documentary
SEMPER FI: ALWAYS FAITHFUL (HDCam) screens on Saturday at 6:45pm
and Thursday at 6pm; and Brad Besser and Vince Clemente's 2011 documentary
THE WORLD OF Z (HDCam) screens on Saturday (8:15pm), Monday (8pm),
and Thursday (7:45pm), with directors Besser and Clemente and subject
Zbigniew Daniel Fiks in person (check with the Film Center for which
screenings: the website says "both" but there are three).
Also at Doc Films
(University of Chicago) this week: Paul Thomas Anderson's 1996 film HARD EIGHT (unknown format)
screens on Friday at 7, 9, and 11pm and on Sunday at 1pm; Bennett Miller's
recent MONEYBALL (unknown format) is Saturday at 7 and 9:45pm
and Sunday at 3pm; Delmer Daves' 1947 Humphrey Bogart film DARK PASSAGE (16mm) is on Tuesday at 7pm; Sergio Leone's 1968 film ONCE UPON A
TIME IN THE WEST (unknown format) s on Wednesday at 7pm; and Guy
Ritchie's 1998 film LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS (35mm)
is the 7pm show on Thursday.
At the Music Box this week:
Asghar Farhadi's new Iranian film A SEPARATION (Unknown Format) and Céline Sciamma's new French film TOMBOY (Unknown Format) both open; Anh Hung Tran's NORWEGIAN WOOD is held over on Saturday and Sunday
at 2pm only; the Saturday and Sunday matinee film is Edward Buzzell's
1947 SONG OF THE THIN MAN (35mm); and the Friday and Saturday
Midnight films are the Coen Brothers' FARGO (35mm) and Ridley Scott's ALIEN: THE DIRECTOR'S CUT (see Also Recommended above).
Facets Cinémathèque continues Jennifer Fox's new documentary MY REINCARNATION this week. Also showing is Ian Palmer's 2011 UK/Ireland documentary
KNUCKLE, screening on Saturday and Sunday at 3 and 5pm. Unknown
formats.
The Chicago History Museum continues
the "Anything but Straight: The LGBT Film Series" on Saturday
from 10am to 4:30pm with the documentaries BROTHER OUTSIDER: THE
LIFE OF BAYARD RUSTIN (84 min) and I AM THE QUEEN (78 min)
and the narratives IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK 2
(97 min) and THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT (see Also Recommended above).
All from DVD.
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