I’m taking a break from my theater coverage to share my predictions for my other consuming passion – the Academy Awards! I’m quite dismayed by the lovefest that is greeting The King’s Speech, especially in a year that produced The Social Network, a masterpiece for the ages. But enough of the pontificating, here are my predicted winners for all categories at this Sunday’s Oscars.
Tags: Academy Awards
The Chicago International Film Festival
ends another year tonight with its 7 pm screening of the The Debt, starring Helen Mirren and Sam Worthington. I ended my Film Festival experience earlier this week with the last of my dozen films – below are my impressions on the last four films I saw. See you all next year for another remarkable film-viewing experience!
I’ve seen some pretty heady, wacky, and at times, whacked-out stuff at the Chicago International Film Festival over the years. Christopher Honore’s Ma Mere, for one, in which Isabelle Huppert’s character has an affair with her son, played by Louis Garrell (who probably sets the cinematic record for male masturbation, including a jaw-dropping final scene when he does the deed while he looks over her dead body in the morgue, of all places). Or Kornél Mundruczó’s Johanna which re-tells the story of Joan of Arc as an opera-musical, set in a Hungarian hospital for the terminally-ill, where a drug-addicted Joan is martyred for trying to heal the patients by having sex with them. Or Kim Ki-duk’s Time about an obsessive woman who undergoes plastic surgery to get back her boyfriend, which contains a lengthy surreal coffee shop scene followed by a chase scene in which the actors are wearing white masks throughout. But this year’s Leap Year, the Mexican film from Australian transplant Michael Rowe, which caused quite the commotion at Cannes earlier this year and won the Camera D’Or prize for best first film, is up there with the outrageously memorable. It is audacious and envelope-pushing, not only because of its graphic sex scenes (an unsimulated hand job, asphyxiation during anal sex and “golden showers”, anyone?) and it’s ferociously brave performance from lead actress Monica del Carmen, but also because by having a laser-sharp focus on the mundane, routinary aspects of a person’s daily life, it is able to paint a vivid, tragic, universal portrait of contemporary urban living. It is breathtaking. Here are my thoughts on Leap Year and other films I saw this week at the Festival, all of them coming to us from Cannes:
The Chicago International Film Festival is in full swing, and I’m swinging along with it. Panting and dizzy is probably more like it, though, given the cinematic shenanigans I witnessed during the first festival weekend – from a guy gagged, bound, hooded, stuffed into the backseat of a car with the engine running in a sealed garage, to graphic sex scenes, amputee and non-amputee alike, to lengthy MRI scans of a woman’s thorax and diaphragm. Yeah, really. Thank goodness for the gay film! I’d like to give props, though, to the Festival organizers, not just for the adventurous programming, but also for more audience-friendly logistics. I think the Festival is really settling in quite gracefully at the AMC River East, its home of the past three years, and there’s less of Nurse Ratched’s mental ward’s frenzy of previous years. The lines to see the films are still there, but they’re less chaotic than before (and the Film Festival experience wouldn’t be complete without these lines – especially if in some of them you bump into long-forgotten participants of your far-flung youth’s numerous walks of shame!). Here are my thoughts on the first set of films I saw at the Festival:
For those of you who’ve read my blog through the years, you know I devote a couple of weeks in October talking about the films I’ve seen at the Chicago International Film Festival. As an arts-conscious Chicagoan, it’s definitely one of the priceless perks of living in this great city. Although there is a lot of heartburn with the graying of the audience demographic in many of our great, world-class cultural institutions, I’m thrilled to say that every year I’m at the Film Festival I see a diverse, younger demographic, with people who you’d expect to mob Lollapalooza lining up for the latest Daren Aronofsky pic, or better yet, for an obscure, wacky South Korean entry. I griped about the slim pickings of last year’s festival, so I’m excited to see the slate of films that are coming our way beginning October 7, in my humble opinion, possibly the strongest selection of films I’ve seen since the early 2000s.
Tags: chicago internatio
Just for the record, as someone who has been a long-standing, proudly goldstar stamp-bearing, laminated card-carrying member of the homo brigade, gay life isn’t all about getting laid at every lamppost (or on a king-size bed with 300 thread-count Frette sheets for some of us). You’d never think otherwise, though, given the continuous mass media attention, bordering on sensationalism, on the sexual aspects of being gay– from the highly-eroticized, fetishistic male pairings in Lady Gaga’s Madonna rehash of a video, “Alejandro”, to the crackling, butch-loving intensity between vampire Bill and werewolf Sam in that Arkansas hotel room in the season opener of True Blood, to the flurry of blog twitters about Inception breakout star (and Goodman Theater headliner) Tom Hardy’s admission about his “fluid” sexual history – for example, here’s The Huffington Post’s headline: “Inception Star Tom Hardy: I’m An Actor, Of Course I’ve Had Gay Sex.” Classy. I am very ambivalent about all this so-called “mainstream acceptance” – all of this was almost unthinkable ten years ago (Will and Grace was pretty neutered, as many have observed), so I’m glad we’ve shown some progress in portraying and disseminating gay-themed material, but there is so much more to being gay than having sex. Gay people, just like, uhmmm, straight people, struggle with relationships, face disappointments and failures, secondguess ourselves, aspire to create and nurture families as best as we can. This whole dichotomy was pretty apparent in my previous weekend’s arts and culture activities: one night, I was at Bailiwick Chicago’s F**king Men, a contemporary, all-male version of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, written by recent Tony winner (for Memphis) Joe Di Pietro; the next day I saw the exquisitely honest Lisa Cholodenko-helmed film The Kids Are All Right, possibly the best film I’ve seen so far this year. F**king Men, despite a solid staging, sadly reinforces gay sexual stereotypes; The Kids Are All Right goes beyond the gay sex (there is hardly any in it too, which is refreshing) and beautifully paints truthful, compelling 21st century lives.
Tags: Bailiwick Chicago
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