Help Hold On To History

Thanks to everyone who's been so patient with the Great Blogging Drought of 2011. It's a huge year for me in terms of writing deadlines and professional obligations, which is the only reason I've been so scarce. Believe me, if I had time to write about the rapturous Tree of Life, I would! Even I don't think a tweet is remotely sufficient. Bear with me a little longer!

Still, some causes are too urgent to postpone, so I want to share some news from Anne Aghion, a filmmaker whose revelatory documentary My Neighbor, My Killer, about the Gacaca Trials and other local aftermaths of the 1994 Rwandan genocides, I saw at the 2009 Chicago Film Festival. I wrote a glowing review of the film, which later showed here in Chicago at Facets' Human Rights Film Festival, though it didn't get nearly the exposure it deserved. That said, two people have told me that the tip-off I provided to this extraordinary piece of work was the most valuable thing they've ever taken from my site; if you'd seen the film, you would easily recognize why they think that.

I was chuffed to get an e-mail today from Aghion, whom I do not know, informing me about a historical and cultural center that she and a colleague are trying to open in Rwanda. Many of us who hear the name of that country still think immediately of genocide, although I'm happy to say that I now have a friend living in Kigali whose reports are giving such a different, richer sense of the nation. Still, even Rwandans have painfully limited access to their own audiovisual history, so Anne Aghion and Assumpta Mugiraneza are working hard to open a Media Archive called the Iriba Center that will offer Rwandans free access to footage, photographs, and documents that preserve and illuminate their cultural legacy—to include, of course, the genocide, but also reaching back through an entire century of other records.

Aghion and Mugiraneza have already raised some key donations toward the amount they will need to open the center, but of course they need more—especially since some of the promised funding is conditional upon the two women independently raising $40,000 themselves, in two months' time. Please read about this impressive project and if you can give anything—literally, the minimum donation is $1—I hope you'll consider donating. I get paid Thursday, so I am broke as a joke right now; believe me, I understand. But one latte for me is $4 that this project could really use, and if 1,000 people felt the same, that'd be 10% of the fundraising bar right there.

And now that I've hit you up for money (though not for me! though I have thought about it!), I promise to do my best not to recede backward into eerie silence. In fact, I already have a comeback project planned, so stay tuned. Think: sunshine... glamor... "the universal language of film"... and microfiche.

So I Reviewed an Axe Murderer

It's been months since I wrote a full-length review of a first-run film, and I was worried about getting kicked off the blogosphere. So, eenie-meenie, meinie-mo, the most recent release I screened as this impulse hit was Cropsey, a documentary that screened as part of last fall's Chicago International Film Festival and begins its Windy City theatrical run on Monday at the Music Box.

I wound up having a lot of objections to the way Cropsey handles a fascinating set of delicate and disturbing questions, some of which revolve around the possibility that a devil-worshiping, hook-handed axe-murderer still haunts the grounds of a notorious, now-defunct asylum in New York City's outermost least beloved borough: Shutter Island on Staten Island. Notwithstanding my caveats, I'd still urge you to go see Cropsey. I'm basically a fan of seeing almost anything at the Music Box, since it remains such a stalwart exhibition venue for international, underfunded, repertory, and nonfiction programming in the city and therefore deserves our fealty. But Cropsey is also a film worth arguing about, and not just because you can't tell who's head you're inside now, or whether or not that top is about to fall. I wish this project had been executed a bit differently, but I vote Yes to almost any movie that so easily guarantees a full dinner hour or two of follow-up conversation. My review is here.

Overheard at CIFF (Updated)

Favorite Exchange (in the audience for Mother):

Older WOMAN, paging through the festival program:
A-ha! Police, Adjective. I found it.
That's why I wanted to see that, because I like Romanian films.

Older MAN, not reading the program:
Is it about oppression?

WOMAN:
Yes.

MAN, very earnest, still not reading:
Oooh, sounds good!

WOMAN, after two beats:
It says it "does a lot by only doing a little."
I think I have to see that!

Favorite Non-Sequitur (in the audience for Red Riding: 1974):

MAN, to his viewing partner:
I have a friend, and he is adamantly Croatian.
I mean, he went to prison.

Favorite Refusal to Budge (in the audience for Face):

MAN, to his viewing partner:
Daniel Day-Lewis is French.

WOMAN, after an incredulous beat:
Of course he's not French. He's English.

MAN:
No, Daniel Day-Lewis is French.

WOMAN, after two beats:
Listen to the name. "Daniel Day-Lewis." There's no way he's French.

MAN, unflappable:
He is French.

WOMAN pulls out her iPhone. Tip-taps. Eventually:
"Daniel Day-Lewis, born 1957, in London, England."

MAN:
But he is French.

(Note: Day-Lewis has had Irish citizenship for years, but I wasn't about to cut in.)

By Far, the Most Tortured Word:

Vincere, aka VIN-SEER. VEE-VUH-RAY. VINKER. VINCER, like "pincer." VEEN-SAYR. VINKERY. Quite memorably, Vuh-RENTZ. Save a thought for the poor Italians at the screening: moaning, wounded. VEEN-chayray, they yelled, to no avail. Hell hath no monolith like a Chicago accent doing whatever the hell it wants.

But anyway, back to Precious: keep those comments going!

CIFF 09: Precious

(NOTE: Review has been revised and, if you can believe it, expanded.)

Since I've been away for two days from regular, review-based festival coverage—busy, I don't mind saying, submitting a dossier of 400+ pages of new writing and teaching materials to ensure the security of my job for the next three years—I figured I needed to come back full swing to keep you hooked on this CIFF material. So what better time to reveal the one exception I made to my general rule of avoiding the marquee presentations of imminent commercial releases? Even if I'm at least as excited about the possibilities of Antichrist, playing elsewhere in the festival lineup, and of Where the Wild Things Are, which I'm dutifully skipping till the festival is over, there was no way anyone was keeping me away from Precious. At this point the film needs no introduction, though my review merits the forewarning that it's one of my longer pieces. Possible spoilers along the way, unless you've already been inundated with coverage about the film, which has tended to speak pretty liberally about its structure and key scenarios. I like the film but couldn't quite love it; as engrossed as I was, I had qualms about the terms on which my fascination and even my sympathy were being elicited. I'll hope to be hearing from you in the Comments, even after the movie rolls out for its hugely hyped commercial release.

Precious played two dates at the Festival, including the Centerpiece Gala where Lee Daniels and Gabourey Sidibe won awards for artistic achievement. The film opens commercially in the U.S. on Fri, 11/6.

CIFF 09: OscarWatch (Updated)

Cheating a little, since end-of-the-week deadlines at work make it impossible for me to generate a full-on review, but I don't want to default entirely on my daily festival coverage. So, some brief notes about the AMPAS viability of the four official submissions for the 2009 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar I have seen or am soon to see at CIFF, all of which await their full reviews:

IRAN: About Elly (IMDb) - I can easily imagine this film earning a nomination, and though I'd still regret the more sublime and ambitious Iranian films that have gone unrecognized for so many years, I'd be to applaud a citation for About Elly. The strong ensemble acting, mystery structure, and production values jell much more closely than almost any previous Iranian submissions have with AMPAS's preferred templates, and the film has built-in appeal for nominators who vote with an eye toward cultural particularity as well as those who are looking for Hollywood-friendly "entertainment." Plus, most of the people I have talked to who have seen About Elly can't get over how gratifyingly unusual it is to see an Iranian picture get major play in the U.S. festival market without being a highbrow formalist work about children or about alienated drifters. The immersion among eight young, attractive, middle-class friends on a weekend trip will probably prove even more eye-opening to Oscar voters than to the cinephiles who have already been rallying behind the movie since Berlin.

MEXICO: Backyard (IMDb) - Seems like a threat for a nomination, especially since director Carlos Carreras has scored here before for The Crime of Father Amaro. Then again, the Academy has certainly passed up lots of recent chances to recognize many, many Latin American thriller-dramas that deal with the kinds of criminal investigations and headline-grabbing scandals that power this movie. The complicated but not too complicated female protagonist played by Ana de la Reguera may register well, as might the overtly feminist outrage of the script, less because Oscar has an estimable career as a global feminist than because of the Academy's persistent urge to feel somewhat hypocritically well-schooled about forms of "oppression" and sociological or bureaucratic deadlock that flourish beyond the U.S., as long as they are dissected within slick, commercial, ultimately reductive aesthetics. Note that this is basically the same recipe they tend to prefer among homegrown "political" dramas. The casting of industry fixture Jimmy Smits in a sort of privileged cameo cannot hurt.

SOUTH KOREA: Mother (IMDb) - I would be astonished if this made the cut, and given Korea's prior inability to find any traction in this category, either with period epics (Chihwaseon) or crossover hits (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring) or festival prizewinners (Secret Sunshine), it would be a major plume in Bong Joon-ho's cap to qualify for this defiantly eccentric combination of murder mystery, deep-black comedy, and maternal-sacrifice melodrama. I suspect it will translate as erratic and overworked to most Academy voters, since even the more sympathetic audiences of festival watchers and devotees of aberrant auteurist perspectives have had mixed responses to the film and to the mannered, intense, bravura performance at its center. As far as that goes, see the comments that have already started accruing to this post.

ROMANIA: Police, Adjective (IMDb) - A very tricky case. I couldn't help thinking that the protracted static shots, the repeated scenes of low-intensity stakeouts and zero-speed police pursuits, and the severity of the atmosphere, color palette, and minimal dialogue would be an impossible sell to AMPAS. But then, some pivotal scenes involving a YouTube video, a populist takedown of arcane grammatical rules, and a climactic, tendentious scene with a dictionary that furnishes the movie its title really brought down the house at the screening I attended, which looked demographically like a plausible mirror for what I suspect a Foreign Language Film Committee screening probably looks like. That is, lots of white hair. Police, Adjective works a similar combo of being and of spoofing (or at least generously tickling) a certain kind of arch, minimalist European art form that paid off with a nomination for The Man without a Past in 2002, another Cannes favorite that few had pegged as the Academy's cup of tea. It won't be an easy "get" for a nod, and the snubbings of the even more accomplished The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (longer write-up here) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days still cast quite a shadow. Police, Adjective, though, exposes its very, very dry funny bone early and obviously enough that voters who might like it could be tempted to stick it out for the even bigger payoffs to come.

CIFF 09: Give Me Your Hand, plus an Extra Helping of Gay

Sticking more or less to my sequence of screenings means my next review is for the movie that has so far made the vaguest impression on me, good or bad, through the festival so far, give or take Mexico's Academy entrant Backyard. I'm talking about the French drama Give Me Your Hand, starring two twin brothers who are easy to look at but harder to feel much about. I don't know if my pulse exceeded 100/60 at any point while I watched the movie or wrote this review, but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway.

Particularly now that Give Me Your Hand has fulfilled its cycle of CIFF screenings, and if you're hankering for some gay cinema that better earns that designation, I hope you'll consider the documentary Quearborn & Perversion: An Early History of Lesbian & Gay Chicago, programmed for just two bookings at the luminously old-fashioned Music Box Theatre on Sunday, October 18, and Tuesday, October 20. The filmmaker, Ron Pajak, developed the project with funding from the Chicago History Museum, which continues to be a tremendous benefactor to our city's LGBT community. I am experiencing a rare bout of regret for pouncing on CIFF like a jacked-up kangaroo from the instant the Festival tickets went on sale last month, since I'm obligated to an unmissable life event on Tuesday night and a scarcely less missable film on Sunday. Happily, I'm lucky enough to have one more chance to see this fantastic-looking, eye-opening, richly researched documentary, but that's only because of Ron's generosity with screeners. You, on the other hand, should file out to the Music Box to find out how much more there is to Queer Chicago than singing at Sidetrack and breakfast at Big Chicks, not that I'm knocking 'em. But let's learn a little, shall we, and let's give Ron a hand.

Give Me Your Hand ended its three-screening run at CIFF on Tuesday 10/13. It recently played the Quad Cinema in New York City and may crop up at similarly esoteric and gay-friendly arthouses near you—even if it requires a real gusto for quick-trigger labeling to read this film as "gay."

CIFF 09: Mary and Max

I alluded yesterday to tremendous enthusiasm for one CIFF screening that I hadn't even copped to screening yet, and today the one-eyed cat is out of the bag: I'm talking about Mary and Max, the feature debut by Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet animator Adam Elliot, which opened this year's Sundance Film Festival but hasn't built the Stateside critical or cult followings that I would have predicted if I'd seen it in January. It's currently playing On Demand on the Sundance channel but will be eligible, apparently, for this year's hotly competitive Best Animated Feature Oscar. Good luck squeezing past all those airborne houses and fantastic foxes and tasty precipitations, but for my money, Mary and Max is the best of a high-caliber bunch. I'm so glad that Glenn Dunks, in this guest entry for Nathaniel last month, made a point of urging us all to keep track of all the recent phenoms from the Australian film market that have inexplicably had a hell of a time crossing over to American distributions, or even American film-blogger buzz. Big thanks to Glenn, to whom the full review is dedicated—and that was before I knew that today was his birthday, so obviously something is Mary and Max-ishly right with our transoceanic connection.

Note, by the way, that even as I've hit my seventh straight day of consecutive full reviews for festival titles, I've decided to be less coy about telling you what I've caught so far, especially if it spurs any Chicagoans to check in on titles like Raging Sun, Raging Sky or About Elly while they're still in the CIFF rotation... or to avoid fatuous wastes of time like the empty, static, self-monumentalizing Vincere, though that one has obviously amassed its loyal fans since Cannes. Keep returning for more on the titles I haven't yet reviewed. It's an insane season at my job to be denying myself these extra hours of sleep, which is the only way to make time for all this writing, but I'm hopeful of posting a review every day through the 22nd, and I'm really enjoying myself.

Mary and Max will play the Festival on Sunday 10/18 and Tuesday 10/20. Stay tuned for whether its projected candidacy for an Oscar nomination prompts a theatrical run somewhere in your city.

CIFF 09: Partners

As the Festival continues, it will get harder to review films such that you'll still have time to catch them if my write-up prompts you to be interested. For instance, I wish to God—or perhaps, following the film's brazen idioms, I pray to an Aztec priestess—that I had time to assemble a full review of the three-hour, Teddy-winning, shape-shifting, humidly surreal Mexican drama Raging Sun, Raging Sky in order to convince even one extra person to catch tonight's screening. That one is neck and neck at the moment with My Neighbor, My Killer and with one other title I haven't yet divulged for my favorite of the fest so far, but it's also as mad as a hatter, prompting several walkouts over the course of its 191 grotty, gropey, robustly homoerotic, unabashedly apocalyptic minutes. I'm dying for people to see it. As Aaliyah memorably posed, are you that somebody?

Keep an eye out for that film and for my further thoughts about it, but for now, my first "lame duck" review of the fest is for Frédéric Mermoud's erotically charged Swiss/French detective thriller Partners (or Complices, in French). Spoiler warning: I really liked it, and I imagine lots of other people would also. Even the couple who couldn't stop talking and whingeing as Raging Sun, Raging Sky barreled onward expressed great enthusiasm for Partners, which is much less of a backhanded compliment than it might sound. Here's the beginning of that review:

"Thank goodness someone invented television, or the Earth would never have had the chance to pose itself such trenchant questions as, What do we as a planet most deeply prefer: quasi-democratic contests among amateur singers, or tense four-way standoffs among forensic analysts, the suspected culprits in their cases, the mauled and blue-lipped victims, and their own upsurges of "humanizing" emotion and bias? Put a microphone or a pair of sterilized tweezers in someone's hand, and the whole world thrills. Eventually, someone will figure out a way to blend these two indefatigable premises, somewhere in the vicinity of So You Think You Can Autopsy?.

Meanwhile, thank goodness, too, that someone invented movies, so that scenarios that could easily boil down to an extended episode of CSI: Lyon actually pop on the big screen, taking advantage of unexceptional but unimpeachably sturdy craftsmanship to tell a two-pronged story about two risk-taking teenagers, at least one of whom is doomed to wash ashore on some brackish French riverbank, and about the two police investigators who keep learning things, and rarely the things they expect to learn, by burrowing further into the case..." (Keep reading)

Partners completed its three-screening run at the festival on Sunday 10/11. Here's hoping you caught it, since I have not discovered any current plans for a U.S. release—though eventually, one seems likely, since Americans will go to French-language movies even when they won't go to any other international films, and Partners has going for it four sexy actors in various states of déshabillé.

CIFF 09: Lovely, Still

Not so very long ago, I was dipping my toe into the eddying waters of Oscar prognostication, at which time I opined that if the infamously unpurchased Lovely, Still ever scores a U.S. distribution deal, then Martin Landau or Ellen Burstyn or both might gratifyingly add to their career tallies of Academy nods. (It would be his fourth and her seventh.) That conjecture was based entirely on second- and third-hand reports on screenings from Toronto '08, but now that I've seen the movie, I feel that I can go on record that Landau and Burstyn probably wouldn't be nominated even if it were 1996 and Harvey Weinstein opened the movie on Christmas Day. The actors are fine but the movie starts out frustratingly slight and inelegant and then slides precipitously into something that actually galled me, and not in that Inglourious Basterds sense of prodigious but diabolically misplaced gifts. I explain what I mean in this full review, but I do hope that Martin and Ellen get other tries at front-and-center parts before they fully retire from the screen. Meanwhile, I'm embarrassed at myself for letting not just Oscar hype, but potential Oscar hype for a movie that hasn't even been bought yet goad me into watching something this amateurish and finally dishonest, when I could have set my sights somewhere else.

You can't win 'em all, but thankfully you can win some of 'em—and after seeing about twice as many CIFF movies as I've admitted so far, I've still seen more good eggs than toss-outs. Keep watching this space!

Lovely, Still plays on Saturday 10/17. Martin Landau plans to attend, so even if you're as disappointed by this new film as I was—and, obviously, you might not be—it would still be a kick to ask him about Bela Lugosi, Cary Grant, and Crimes and Misdemeanors.

CIFF 09: My Neighbor, My Killer

My first major discovery of the Chicago Film Festival is the documentary My Neighbor, My Killer, which will be an insuperably hard sell to lots of audience because it's about the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide—specifically, about the locally mounted communal trials by which survivors of the national massacre accuse, listen to, and sentence suspected perpetrators who have recently been released from jails, once the official courts became hopelessly clogged and the processes of jurisprudence and of healing, whether or not those have anything to do with each other, grew ever slower. The film itself is smartly, profoundly, tough-mindedly evocative of almost every side of this unfathomable circumstance. It is robustly present-oriented, rhyming with the ethos of the courts to help everyone move forward, without getting saddled in the past, even if that's a profoundly impossible edict to maintain in a country like Rwanda. If anything, the film skimps a bit too much on historical and contextualizing information (I recommend Gérard Prunier's The Rwanda Crisis for an incisive and comprehensive historical account), but the film teems with interviews and with snapshots of awkward, enormously loaded personal encounters that I'm sure I will never forget, and not for the reasons I anticipated. Click here for my full review, and keep your eye out for the movie.

Please do, by the way, click on these reviews, link to them on your sites, or post comments on these blog posts, even if you don't plan on catching the movie soon or having time to read the full write-ups just yet. It's quite an exercise in generosity when these festivals afford me a press pass, since I'm not connected to any "official" media outlet, and being able to verify that people are reading these entries and taking stock of the films—especially the ones you haven't read about elsewhere—will allow me to keep scoring gigs like this. Thanks!

My Neighbor, My Killer plays Sunday 10/11 and Tuesday 10/20.

CIFF 09: The Eclipse

Note: Today's and yesterday's CIFF reviews fall notably short of "rave" territory, but already I have encountered two gems on which to fill you in. Stay tuned!

I regret that my summertime undertaking of a theater-centered blog to complement this one was such a quick casualty of the busy fall, but I will hope to check in over there occasionally. I do love plays, and I'm always eager to see how strong playwrights fare as their work travels to the screen, particularly when they get to test their own hands in this new medium. I was off-consensus last year about Martin McDonagh's feature-length debut In Bruges, which I found to be hectoring and over-worked, and lacking the emotional sincerity that would have driven home its ambitious character arcs and committed central performances. Still, I can see why people who like In Bruges like it. I will be less easy to persuade that my cool response to The Eclipse, a rare cinematic foray for Shining City and Seafarer scribe Conor McPherson, amounts so easily to an issue of personal taste, and I doubt it will prompt nearly as many people to try to bring me around to greater enthusiasm. It works serviceably as a generically spooky mood-piece and has some nice acting moments from Ciarán Hinds and Iben Hjejle, plus it's the only movie that's ever found occasion for the line, "Yes, I was terrified, but at the same time I was so intrigued and fascinated that I actually wound up studying theoretical physics at university." The auditor of this comment offers the only conceivable response, which is "Jesus!"

Now, that's entertainment. Unfortunately, though, The Eclispe lacks the focus or the courage to be as fragile and understated in generating its eerie moods as McPherson's play scripts generally are. There's also one howler of a performance from someone who should really know better. You can read my full reaction here, but as always with festival reviews, I warmly invite you to go check it out for yourself. Hinds did win the Best Actor prize at Tribeca for this turn, and if low-intensity disquiet and a few whiplash jolts are what you're after, this might be just the vehicle.

The Eclipse plays tonight, Friday 10/9, and also on Saturday 10/10 and Friday 10/16.

CIFF 09: Air Doll

With the festival commencing this evening, I am already taking a long lead on one title that won't start showing until the second week, but whose renowned director might well prompt a run on tickets among the kinds of patrons who flock to the CIFF every year. My second review for the fortnight is thus of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll, which sadly makes a stronger bid than I had hoped for the alternate title Air Head. Shot by In the Mood for Love and Millennium Mambo cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bin, the film lacks the aesthetic heft or disciplined shape of the former and surpasses even the latter for vacuous cosmetics and patience-trying protraction. If that strikes you as an unfair thumbnail of Millennium Mambo—and Hou is definitely a filmmaker that Air Doll appears to have on its mind, such as it is—then this might be a title for you, but as my review testifies, I was quickly put off.

Air Doll plays on Saturday 10/17, Sunday 10/18, and Monday 10/19.

CIFF 09: Kickoff, and Paranormal Activity

The Chicago International Film Festival kicks off tomorrow, and I could barely be more excited. How very kind of my windy metropolis to throw me a birthday bash every year, and this time to amplify that already transparent correlation by underscoring its own birthday: 145 films exhibited from 45 different countries to mark the festival's 45th year. Admittedly, I haven't bean-counted the program to make sure things really do stack up this elegantly. I am happy to be a sucker for the marketing staff and its pleasingly professed numerology.

I will not be attending the red-carpet opening-night gala screening of Motherhood, a comedy directed by Katherine Dieckmann, who got Paul Rudd looking so good in cold-weather clamming duds a few years back in Diggers. Even in this prodigiously exciting year for women directors, especially those who maintain artistic ambitions for commercial narrative film, regular readers know that I need even more incentives than that to watch Uma attempt comedy. Prime, sadly, is not as distant a memory for me as it might be for you. I did, however, marvel at this overheard conversation a few weeks ago at CIFF headquarters, as a staffer worked out some kinks in Uma's travel plans over the phone with some unseen agent:

Last name is "Thurman." First name "Uma." U-M-A. Yes, it's the actress... She's in movies. She was in Pulp Fiction... Do you see movies?... No, I don't think she was in that... Hmm-mm... Oh, yes, I think she was in My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

I'm not an Uma-phile, but she didn't deserve that. Thankfully for her, the festival is throwing a big show in her honor, endowing her with its Career Achievement Award. Meanwhile, I am reminded of what I almost always forget, which is how little the movies matter to a tremendous number of people. I even know some people like this, though I attempt to deny it, and goad them by inviting them along to things.

Anyway, failing any coverage of Motherhood, and slyly bridging from what I was just talking about into my festival pieces, I want to alert you to the one-time, Saturday-night CIFF screening of the increasingly-hyped but still elusive Paranormal Activity. As I promised in my first post about CIFF '09, I will almost entirely avoid imminent commercial releases within the CIFF program in lieu of filling you in on carryover hits from other festivals that I doubt you've been able to see yet, and some even more under-the-radar titles from around the world. So, as I commence with a full review of a title that I'm guessing will bloom into a fuller-scale, nationwide release sometime between now and Halloween, I urge you to seek out this movie, whether amid the Chicago Film Festival or in your own town, but not to anticipate many more CIFF dispatches that skew quite this commercial.

You'll know soon enough what you think, and what I think, about An Education and The Young Victoria and Antichrist (although, man, it hurt not to buy that ticket). For the next two weeks, I'll shine a light instead on less heralded films and filmmakers and on national cinemas from well beyond the beaten path of U.S. commerce. Admittedly, you'll be well within your rights to observe that Andrea Arnold and Bong Joon-ho and the rising tide of Romanian masters hardly amount to undiscovered talents or breaking news. But much of my docket should offer even fresher material to my readers than however I wind up responding to these relative celebrities of the cinephile world.

But first, we've got one nasty $%@# of a demonic malefactor to attend to...

Image © 2007 Blumhouse Productions, © 2009 Paramount Pictures. Paranormal Activity plays late in the evening on Saturday 10/10. Tickets will go fast, if they haven't already.

Start the Car, I Know a Whoopee Spot

Where the city's cold, but cinema is hot! With the ticket counters opening and the new website premiering yesterday for the Chicago International Film Festival, we have officially arrived at one of my favorite periods of the year, and certainly the month when I am happiest to be a Chicagoan. Sure, I still dream one day of making it to Toronto, Telluride, or one of the European festivals, but the CIFF is a bonafide cornucopia and deserves much wider recognition than it gets. Then again, part of why its profile remains a little lower than those of some other festivals is that this one isn't a sales market and, despite wonderful Gala Presentations where I've met the likes of Laura Linney in the past, it doesn't host a lot of flashbulby premieres. What CIFF willingly forgoes in global press scoops it gains back tenfold in the privilege it gives to average moviegoers to enjoy the films, afford the tickets, and hobnob much more closely with visiting filmmakers than it's possible to do at a Toronto or a Cannes, with their phalaxes of studio scouts and frenzied, hierarchalized reporters.

This year's special guests will include Career Achievement Award winner Uma Thurman and her most recent director Katherine Dieckmann, Precious helmer and Artistic Achievement Award winner Lee Daniels, the same film's Breakthrough Performance honoree Gabourey Sidibe, plus Willem Dafoe, Lone Scherfig, Martin Landau (proving that the much-hyped but distro-seeking Lovely, Still still exists!), Virginia Madsen and her Emmy-winning mother Elaine, Ben Foster, Oren Moverman, John Woo, and Patrice Chéreau. Cinephiliac celeb-spotters could do a lot worse, and Special Presentations of The Yellow Handkerchief (from the where's-he-been director of My Son, the Fanatic) and of the Tennessee Williams-scripted and Bryce Dallas Howard-starring The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, directed by Safe ensemble member Jodie Markell, are promising guest visits without naming names. (A hint: it's probably not Tennessee Williams.)

Of course, the emphasis remains deservedly on the movies, and I've already bought tickets to a baker's dozen, being as scrupulous as I can to avoid imminent commercial releases, even the one's I'm dying to see. I fully expect to buy plenty more, particularly for movies from Iran, Mexico, Taiwan, the UK, Ireland, Israel, Chile, Syria, Australia, South Korea, France, Switzerland, Italy, the USA, and the Philippines that are unlikely to sell out, even though that Filipino entry, The 'Thank You' Girls (pictured left), is free one night if you show up in drag.

Of course, life always intervenes to dictate that I see slightly less than I intend, and my attendance last year got cut short by my sublime trip to the concurrent London Film Festival. Still, with only two days to enjoy last year's offerings, I filed early, elated reviews of Julia and Ballast, both of which surfaced on my year-end Top Ten list, which is surely the most you can ask of two days at the movies. The year before, I got my first looks at 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Taxi to the Dark Side, Yella, Silent Light, and Flight of the Red Balloon and told you at length everything to love and occasionally not to love about Michael Clayton, Hallam Foe (later released Stateside as Mister Foe), Stuck, Control, the since-unseen Mohsen Makhmalbaf film Scream of the Ants, and the entrancing Argentine dystopian comedy The Aerial/La Antena (pictured left), which scored two citations in my annual awards that year.

I can't say it more clearly: attend this festival, if you're anywhere near the Windy City. Where the Wild Things Are, New York, I Love You, and, God help us, Couples Retreat will all still be waiting for you after the two-week event wraps on October 22. Meanwhile, eye this space for CIFF09 dispatches, starting October 8!