A reduced, streamlined Chicago International Film Festival opened it’s 45th year last night with the premiere of Uma Thurman’s latest flick, Motherhood, and will run for the next 14 days until October 22. For many Chicagoans, the fall season marker is the Chicago Marathon (happening this weekend), for me, self-styled, hot-blooded film aficionado, it’s the Festival. I was a little surprised, though, at the lack of big, event-type movies in this year’s schedule, since last year saw the likes of eventual Oscar Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire, Mickey Rourke’s return to civilization, The Wrestler, Arnaud Desplechin’s festival circuit favorite A Christmas Tale, and Charlie Kauffman’s headscratching debut, Synecdoche, New York, among others. This year, only two much-buzzed-about films are included in the Festival slate, the latest Lars Von Trier sex-gore-talking fox grostesquerie, AntiChrist, which provoked massive walkouts at Cannes but won the Best Actress Award for star Charlotte Gainsbourg for cutting her delicate parts in extreme, jawdropping close-up; and Lee Daniel’s Precious, based on the book “Push” by Sapphire, which has been acclaimed everywhere from Sundance and Toronto, with alleged Oscar frontrunner performances from Mo’Nique and Mariah Carey (Academy Award-nominated Mariah Carey???? This trumps Lars von Trier talking-fox-genital-cutting insanity! You go, girl!). This lack of showcase films, many of which we’ll get to see anyway in their regular runs after the festival, may bode well for the celluloid-mad Chicago audience to discover obscure gems that may never see the light of commercial release in the United States. My own festival viewing slate (I buy a pass every year) is a combination of festival circuit favorites and little-known films that could potentially be transcendent…or a train wreck.
I’ve seen so many theater openings over the past three weeks, I’ve actually been able to pull some of them together with a clever (or in my mind, at least) blog post theme. Here are my impressions on four season openers currently playing on Chicago stages:
Tags: Court Theatre, Porchlight Music Theatre, Strawdog Theatre Company, Victory Gardens Theater
Every year when I receive Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s high-gloss, visually arresting season brochure, I hesitate for a couple of seconds and stop to think that maybe this year is the year that I will finally purchase a regular season subscription. But I don’t. However, like Kanye West in front of a bottle of Hennessy, I lose all self-resolve during the year and purchase single tickets to most, if not all, of the season’s productions (which makes the theatergoing more expensive). And I don’t know why; is it because, most of the time, going to Chicago Shakespeare, with its classy interiors, well-dressed patrons, hushed ushers, plush seats, and dramatic view of the lake and the Pier from every window (including the men’s bathroom’s), evokes this unmistakable feeling of going to THE THEATRE, and all the intellectual heft and palette superiority that THE THEATRE implies? Probably not, since I have a more egalitarian, more embracing view of the power of live theater than some people. I think it’s simply because I am always optimistic and hopeful that the production I purchased a ticket for would turn out to be more like the exuberant and contemporaneous Twelfth Night than a boring turkey like Cymbeline or a disingenuous wanna-be hipster like Macbeth. Unfortunately, this year’s season opener, Richard III, one of Shakespeare’s most interestingly potent tragedies, follows in the tradition of disappointments at the theater jutting out onto the lake, with a production that is not just soporific, but also befuddling and, frankly, quite lazily staged. Maybe I should get a clue from Kanye’s tips on how he laid off the cognac.
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