From the Ledge

After working almost nonstop for the past month, including most weekends, I needed some decompression time last weekend.  Many people would have decompressed by reading a book by the pool, or by cycling along the lakeshore bike path for many hours, or even by walking around in a cocktail-induced haze during last weekend’s Gay Pride festivities.  Since I’m battier than a New Mexico rock cave, my formula for stress relief, however, involved seeing Steven Adly Gurgis’s long (two and a half hours) metaphysical discourse on the nature of guilt and forgiveness, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, being given an energetic production by the Gift Theater, and attending the Luchino Visconti retrospective at the Siskel Film Center for the long (two and a half hours too!), over-the-top, insanely mesmerizing Visconti masterpiece, The Damned.  Paraphrasing the even battier Col. Kilgore of Apocalypse Now, (sigh deeply) I love the smell of extremely provocative art in the morning!

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Tags: Gift Theater, Siskel Film Center

Whew!  It’s the last full week of June and the long fourth of July weekend will soon be upon us.  Where was I during this month? Oh right, working on a couple of big deals, and shuttling between New York and Chicago (not to mention having to go out to Schaumburg for a couple of days and getting stuck in notorious, nefarious I-90 traffic). This month felt like I was on a bullet train to nowhere; which is not good for an arts and culture blogger.   I can’t believe I haven’t been in a theater since June 1 when I was underwhelmed by Mary-Arrchie’s Beggars in the House of Plenty.  Well, the deals have been put to bed and hopefully the next couple of weeks will be a little bit quieter, with more time and focus to savor Chicago’s thriving summer cultural life.  Who wants to work like an ox plowing a muddy field during the heightened heat and humidity of July?

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Tags: Siskel Film Center, Steppenwolf Theatre

The Cannes Film Festival is a big deal; probably the biggest deal for avid, true-blue cineastes the world over, definitely bigger than the celebrity skifest that is the Sundance Film Festival.  No Country for Old Men’s Oscar campaign started in Cannes last May, where it actually received lukewarm reviews and was overshadowed by the acclaim for the Romanian masterpiece 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (which ran away with the Palme D’Or, or Best Film prize, and Best Director honors, respectively), two of the best-reviewed films of 2007.  The 2008 Main Competition slate was unveiled last Thursday for the Festival that will run from May 14-25, and amongst the high-profile films competing for the Palme D’Or, such as Clint Eastwood’s period piece, Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie; Steven Soderbergh’s four hour opus about Che Guevarra, Che, with Benicio del Toro in the title role; Charlie Kaufman’s sure-to-be-eccentric-but-cool debut movie, Synecdoche, New York; former Cannes winners’ the Dardennes brothers’ La Silence de Lorna, and Wim Wender’s multi-lingual The Palermo Shooting, which sounds really perplexing (I mean with the lead singer of the German punk band Die Toten Hosen and Milla Jovovich as headliners, you gotta wonder what kind of medication Wenders is now on), is….Serbis, directed by Brilliante Mendoza of the Philippines!  Yes, after more than a quarter of a century, the much maligned Philippine film industry, which continues to demonstrate more lives than three dead cats, is going to be represented in the Main Competition of the most prestigious film event in the world.  Yay! 

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Tags: Brilliante Mendoza, Cannes Film Festival, Filipino film

Two of the slots in Francis’s “20 essential films to be marooned in a deserted island with” belong to films directed by the brilliant Wong Kar-Wai:  the quirky, delicious, delirious, and ultimately heartbreaking Chungking Express (1994), about two sets of lovers in a Hong Kong anxiously awaiting the handover back to China, and the gorgeously-shot and designed but bone-achingly sad tale of two unhappily married people falling in love with each other, In the Mood for Love (2000), which Sofia Coppola has acknowledged as one of the main inspirations for her own masterpiece of dislocated feelings, Lost in Translation.  I am such an ardent Wong fan that I have seen almost all of his movies and some of them twice.  Two years ago, I took a Facets Film School class about his work, and nearly brawled with two annoyingly pretentious, pseudo film-geeks who seemed like they based their knowledge of Asian culture on being avid customers of Panda Express (sniff!).  I really think Wong is unsurpassed right now among contemporary directors in successfully evoking mood, emotions, and characters’ perspectives with the barest of dialogue- instead he uses cinematography, actors’ facial expressions, design, and innovative editing techniques (both fast-frame and slow motion).  Wong has a unique, identifiable style, and a very specific East Asian point of view - a world view that contains fatalism; deep-seated melancholy; loyalty (to family, to loved ones); a focus on subtext and unexpressed emotions; the powerful influence of the past on the present and the de-emphasis, almost the avoidance, of thinking about the future and what comes next.  So I was very, very nervous to go see his first English-language film, My Blueberry Nights, set and shot in America, starring Hollywood stars…and Norah Jones.  Will his style and sensibility translate well?  Will he be able to still create a distinctive Wong Kar-Wai film versus an attempt to come up with a Hollywood art film?  Can he give an interesting take on distinctively American situations, characters, and milieus? What can he do with Norah Jones’s, uhmmm, acting prowess?  Well, I’m sure Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, Warren Buffett, masters all of their fields, have had bad days sometimes, and that’s fine.  I’d like to think that the Wong who directed My Blueberry Nights was just having one long bad day.

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Tags: My Blueberry Nights, Wong Kar-Wai

It was such a terrific night last night at the People’s Choice awards - Katherine Heigl, Keri Russell, The Rock, Hannah Montana, Jonah Hill- all looked dapper or gorgeous or both and seemed to be utterly enjoying themselves…what a great night…wait, it wasn’t the People’s Choice awards on Channel 7, but the Oscars?…the Oscars with those people?  Was this some surreal Stanley Kubrick-like nightmare?  Had I been punk’d like many film buffs and avid Oscar watchers?  Where were Streep, de Niro, Jodie Foster, Pacino?  Hell, where was Julia “I LOVE my life” Roberts?  Where were the real movie stars and Academy award winners???    Although I was aghast at the presenters at last night’s fete, I was breathlessly ecstatic at the winners of the acting awards, which reflected the true global nature of film and the universality of great talent.  For the first time since 1965, all four Oscar winners in the acting categories were from outside of the US.  Ok, so maybe not all of them were my personal favorites to win (except maybe for Marion Cotillard), but they are all supremely talented, performed in movies and roles that were substantial and for the most part memorable, and have given fresh, marvelous performances through the years, so who am I to quibble?   On to my Oscar recap for this year, which may pale in comparison to the dazzling LA weekend that the divine Ms. Jennifer M. recounts in her blog post below (Jen, was that you in the oversized sweatshirt and elastic headband trying to elbow out Sarah, the Oscars’ oldest bleacher fan, while she was being interviewed by Regis Philbin during the pre-show?  Damn, you and Sarah looked good!)

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This Oscar-related post is written by guest blogger Jen.

Here’s a rundown of my uber-glammy weekend in the City of Angels during Oscar 2008!

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