From the Ledge

Since I started going to the Film Festival in 1999, I always feel a little “festivaled”-out by the second weekend.  It is sometimes a struggle to haul my bleary-eyed, stiff-backed, sensation-weary self back for another go-round of films about Kazakh magic healers or Argentine illegal loggers.  But my second week schedule for this year contained some of the most surprising, most overwhelming, most provocative films I’ve seen recently.  They weren’t all successful, but their daring, original, thoughtful topics made for some interesting, sometimes difficult and emotionally-draining, viewing.  Here, then, are my thoughts on the final four films of my viewing schedule for the 2009 Chicago International Film Festival:

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Tags: Chicago International Film Festival

Even for a film festival junkie like me, the whole thing could sometimes be a little too much.  After the tenth time of lining up for a film, or after suffering through another concentration-requiring scene while the person beside you loudly chows down on his nachos like a Siberian tiger gnoshing on a piece of deer leg (thank goodness for subtitles!), or after the fifth Q and A session with a film’s director full of inane questions (such as “what’s your advice for an aspiring filmmaker?” to which my response would have been “It’s to get the hell out of a film festival Q and A session and make a film! Geez!”), I sometimes wonder why my DNA wasn’t rigged to be a Cubs fan instead.  Drunk on their ass wearing sweat-stained shirts in a Wrigleyville bar, they look like they live much simpler lives.  Then the lights go down on a film which turns out to be exhilaratingly stimulating and transcendent, and I wouldn’t want to trade my film festival life for a Cubbie fan’s life- ever (plus, where would I get such heinous outfits?). Several years ago, that film was Michael Haneke’s Cache, which was followed the next year by Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, both of which went on to much deserved universal acclaim.  This year, that wonderful film that defines my film festival experience for the year is another one from Romania, Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, a prime example of envelope-pushing filmmaking, which had already won this year’s Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard Jury Prize.  My comments on Police, Adjective and two other films I saw in the past couple of days are below:

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Tags: Chicago International Film Festival

So this year’s Chicago International Film Festival (CIFF) is in full swing – well, as full a swing as a lesser number of films and smaller theaters will allow.  I think it’s somewhat misleading to see all those “Sold Out” signs on the Festival’s big schedule board by the ticket tables at AMC River East, because I think most of those films were being shown in the smaller theaters in this cineplex (three of the first four films I saw were in these theaters).  In previous years, when the venues were the much larger Music Box Theater (where I had various body parts shoved in my face during the scramble for seats for Patrice Chereau’s Intimacy, for example) or the Landmark Century, “sold out” signs meant there were herds of film aficionados in the house.  I’m not sure that’s the case this year.  I’ll be eagerly anticipating the Festival’s attendance figures, but I hope there aren’t less people attending – that’s going to be a shame, because the Film Festival is a pretty critical element of this city’s cultural fabric.  In the meantime, here are my reactions to the first set of films I saw since last week’s opening:

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Tags: Chicago International Film Festival

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. 

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Tags: Chicago International Film Festival

I was having lunch recently with a friend who I consider to be fairly sophisticated and open-minded, when, during the course of conversation regarding sexual and gender identity, she categorically, flatly stated that she didn’t believe that there was such a thing as bisexuality – that men who claim to be bisexual were really closeted gay men.  I was a little taken aback, and of course, I vigorously disagreed, since based on my experience as a gay man with complicated relationships with both gay and straight people, I’ve come to believe pretty strongly that sexual identity is not as simple, as easily labeled into defined quadrants, as many people seem to, or want to, believe it is.  I’m very convinced that sexual identity shifts and moves along a continuum, settling at some steady state during a particular period of time, which may or may not be permanent.  In our contemporary times, sexual fluidity seems to be more pronounced and embraced that it was even as recently as ten years ago.  But American film is light years away from reality most of the time, so no Hollywood movie has so far touched this topic with a ten foot pole (except for the bromance comedies such as I Love You, Man, which dilutes the provocation by making fun of it).  That is why Lynn Shelton’s low-budget independent movie Humpday, winner of a Special Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and official Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight selection, about two straight male friends who, on a drunken dare, agree to make a home movie of the two of them having sex, is so current, so fresh, so insightful, so riveting; it’s possibly the best film I’ve seen so far in the half year.

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Tags: Humpday

So having spent most of last week in Sonoma for a vacation that quickly turned from a real one to a “partial” one (after I was asked to go on eastern time zone conference calls, which made for very long days and called for lots more beverage imbibing later on in the day), I’m still catching up on my arts and culture news from last week.  Of course the big news in the American film world is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ announcement that next year’s Oscars will have ten (yes, as in diez, dix, dieci, zehn) Best Picture nominees instead of five.  OK, so there is precedent for this, the Oscars were nominating ten films for Best Picture from roughly around it’s inception to 1943 (when Casablanca won over The Ox-Bow Incident, Song of Bernadette, Watch on the Rhine, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, among others).  But that was the golden age of Hollywood film-making.  Seriously, would the Academy have been able to get 10 films nominated for Best Picture during the past several years?  There is serious barrel-bottom-scraping that comes to mind with the nominees in this decade for example (Chocolat in 2000? Seabiscuit in 2003? Michael Clayton in 2007? Frost/Nixon this year?)  How are they going to fill up those ten slots, when historically they have been unable to pick five really good pictures to nominate?  So will The Hangover and Transformers:  Revenge of the Fallen get a pretty good shot at a Best Picture nomination? The snub for The Dark Knight aside, it almost seems like box-office success is a better predictor of an Oscar Best Picture nomination than artistic criteria.  Boy, this disappointing, perplexing news is enough to make this avid Oscar-watcher hang up his binoculars.

Tags: Academy Awards