Happy 50th, Chicago Film Festival!

I've known since I moved here that I shared a spiritual link with the Chicago International Film Festival, and this year the case only gets stronger. On October 9, the festival will turn 50 on the same day I turn 37, and as happens every year, the programmers will whup even my relatives and loved ones in the competition for Best Gift.  Tickets go on sale to the public today, though one of the perks of joining Cinema/Chicago and supporting the organization is getting a two-day head start on those purchases.  I suspect I won't be the only patron who feels I am being showered with presents.

For their golden anniversary, the leadership has curated a selection that, according to Programming Director Mimi Plauché,"ties back to the history of the festival and also looks forward in so many ways." That commitment to its own heritage begins with the Opening Night selection of Liv Ullmann's Miss Julie, extending CIFF's streak of programming all of Ullmann's directorial efforts since her first in 1992 (including a new personal favorite of mine, Private Confessions, which won Pernilla August a richly deserved Best Actress award here in 1996).  Ullmann will be back to introduce the film and take questions, as will Hollywood directors and CIFF loyalists Oliver Stone and Taylor Hackford, who will screen some favorites among their own work: Natural Born Killers and the extended cut of Alexander in Stone's case, The Idolmaker and White Nights in Hackford's.  CIFF will also host the North American premiere of the newly restored Why Be Good?, released simultaneously as a silent and a talkie in 1929 and previously thought lost.  The star, Colleen Moore, plays a character named "Pert," which is all I need to know. She will be familiar to CIFF audiences as the inspiration for the Franju-esque graphic that CIFF has used as its logo since its inception, since she helped to found the whole institution.  Archival pleasures extend as well to a four-film cycle of Isabelle Huppert's greatest post-2000 hits, selected by the actress herself and screening all in 35mm at the Music Box: The Piano Teacher (blistering), Comedy of Power (diabolical), Copacabana (atypically comic), and White Material (unmissable).  Whether Huppert herself will alight for the occasion was not clear, but a girl can dream.

Miss Julie, despite being an Irish-set and substantially Irish-funded production, also commences in its way CIFF 2014's spotlight on Scandinavian cinema, which encompasses among many other films Ruben Östlund's festival smash Force Majeure, which I couldn't get into in Toronto; Norway's 1001 Grams, already submitted for Oscar consideration; Sweden's The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, which at least gave Roy Andersson some competition in the race for memorable film titling; encore screenings of Breaking the Waves and Fanny and Alexander; a portmanteau of recent Nordic short films; and Iceland's Of Horses and Men, already a cult favorite, with an indelible poster and this IMDb logline: A country romance about the human streak in the horse and the horse in the human. Love and death become interlaced and with immense consequences. The fortunes of the people in the country through the horses' perception. You can bet I'm skipping the one-night-only screening of Birdman to be there.

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A Sit-Down with Saint Joan

Tonight the 48th Chicago International Film Festival bestowed a Silver Hugo for Career Achievement on the actress Joan Allen, an Illinois native, Tony winner, co-founder of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and three-time Oscar nominee.  With candor falling just shy of tact, CIFF executive director Michael Kutza conveyed how long he has wanted to give Allen this award.  Appearing at the end of a 90-minute career retrospective, he recalled a Steppenwolf anniversary celebration from years ago where he first seized on the idea of the film festival honoring one of that company's crossover stars.  "But Gary Sinise is mostly a TV personality by now, and so definitely not for us," Kutza publicly confided, before classifying John Mahoney as even more of a small-screen name and admitting, "Frankly, Malkovich scares me."

While staying all smiles, Allen manifested her signature knack for projecting multiple things at once—in this case, a sincere gratitude at being so warmly recognized and an element of perplexity at this abrupt if comically intended rundown of her close colleagues.  At least no one sitting in Screen 20 of the AMC River East could doubt Kutza's admiration for this consummate performer, or take issue with the formal language that came with the trophy: "For dazzling audiences with your radiant performances on stage and screen, whatever the character, genre, or budget."  Had this actually been engraved on the silver plating, I would have been able to read it. Showing up early to the ticketholders' line meant I snagged a first-row seat, from which I could literally spot the holes in the buckled straps on Allen's boots.

"Dazzling" and "radiant" indeed in all black, Allen came across as open and easygoing, while still giving something of a performance.  She happily offered production-side memories of every movie that the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips asked her about, while choosing adjectives carefully for subjects that might have required some diplomacy, especially before a large audience.  Most of all, she gave the impression of a cheerful and thoughtful Midwesterner, eager to chat but vigilant against oversharing or impoliteness, fond of her work and touched at the room-filling show of public affection, but rarely inclined to linger over past triumphs.  She admitted, for example, to not having seen Nixon (a Nick's Flick Picks favorite) since it premiered in theaters, and a wordless reaction to one of Phillips's questions suggests she hasn't screened The Ice Storm in a while, either.  Devotees like myself who have read a lot of Allen interviews may not have left with an embarrassment of new stories, and I don't know why the planners didn't schedule any time for an audience Q&A.  Still, the anecdotes ranged far and wide, even when they demurred from going too deep. And as loyal readers knew I would, I managed to get my question in anyway.

The funny, avuncular Phillips was, as ever, an ideal choice to moderate.  He has worked as both a theater critic and film reviewer, making him knowledgeable and enthusiastic about both of the arenas where Allen has achieved greatest distinction (though she has made memorable impressions on television as well, in projects like Michael Mann's truncated HBO series Luck and the 2009 Lifetime movie Georgia O'Keeffe, for which she was executive producer).  In fact, Phillips recalled visiting Chicago from the University of Minnesota in the early 1980s to see Allen and her Steppenwolf cohort in And a Nightingale Sang..., the play that eventually brought the actress to New York.  Meeting her after this performance "turned me into Don Knotts," Phillips confided, before charmingly if unintentionally failing to find the right adjective to capture her flexible, charismatic incisiveness on screen: "She's what I call an excellent working actor," he offered by way of introduction, "who's so... so...," and we all knew just what he meant.  The clip-reel that played before Allen's entrance evoked the longevity of her career across bigger and smaller parts, while still hewing closely to the best-known titles on her résumé—a greatest-hits framing to which the conversation mostly adhered.

Early topics included Allen's admission that it took about five years after her first film role (a small part in 1985's Compromising Positions) to feel that "the penny really dropped" in terms of comfort before a camera.  She described the boons of being a student at Eastern Illinois University, where the small size of the program allowed her to tackle during her early college years meaty parts like Nurse Ratched, Laura Wingfield, and even Linda Loman, however "ludicrously" age-inappropriate some of these were.  She also got rich educations in lighting, costuming, and scenic design, since the program was geared toward producing jack-of-all-trades theater professors to teach at other schools, and thus forced actors to know their vocation from many sides.  Phillips inquired, too, about the ethos and conversations in the early years of Steppenwolf, especially after Malkovich's breakout success in films opened a new route for Chicago actors into national acclaim.  Allen described this period as exciting but difficult for the company, with ambitious troupe members somewhat at odds with those who felt protective of the specific identity and talent base of Windy City dramatics. She remembers her own position as somewhere in the middle, glad for New York opportunities and (she wasn't too proud to add) New York paychecks, but more than contented with her lot as a member of a thriving Second City ensemble.

From here, Phillips advanced to questions about the first proper auteurs she worked with, Michael Mann on Manhunter and Francis Ford Coppola on Peggy Sue Got Married (both 1986). Using gingerly euphemisms about the former, which she remembers as "quite a shoot," Allen recalled Mann as a "very, very... driven" filmmaker who would make every day a 20-hour call if he could.  Still, she sounded fully sincere in praising his work with actors and his visual eye, even if "we'd make jokes when he'd switch a man's necktie for the twelfth time before a shot."  Going from Mann, who barely held rehearsals, to Coppola, who relished and even videotaped them, involved quite a leap.  A bigger jump involved getting used to an invisible director: "I remember Francis as one of the pioneers of watching on a monitor, not from behind a camera or near the actors.  So someone would yell 'Action,' and we'd be going, 'But where is he?'"

Around that time, Allen entered a period where her second- or third-tier parts on film and television suited her relative comfort in these media, even as she was headlining and winning major prizes for plays like Lanford Wilson's Burn This, which she played for almost two years, and Wendy Wasserstein's Tony and Pulitzer winner The Heidi Chronicles, where she anchored every scene.  Phillips skipped a lot of this supporting-actress journeywoman work in films like Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988, again for Coppola) or Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993) and moved to that mid-90s trifecta that marked many filmgoers' whiplash introduction to this quiet powerhouse: Nixon (1995), The Crucible (1996), and The Ice Storm (1997).  The audience saw short clips of the memorable scenes, respectively, where Pat first threatens to walk out on her petulant husband; where Elizabeth Procter is being hauled off to jail; and where Elena Hood charges her husband, in a rain-battered car, with knowingly taking them to a key party.  Among this group, Phillips actually started with the last in the sequence, naming Ice Storm one of his favorite films of the 1990s and "one of the most tonally complex pictures of that decade," a feeling Ang Lee apparently facilitated by keeping his actors off-guard.  Enlisting more euphemisms, or else just combing her mind for the mot juste, Allen remembers Lee as "gentle, yes," to use Phillips's word, "but... very... specific, also."  Adding, "I think he's maybe a little tougher than people think," Allen recalls him banning actors absolutely from seeing dailies of their performances. "'You don't know what you're doing, but I do,'" he'd insist.

Many readers, I imagine, would have longed as I did for more probing of Allen's less touted projects.  She was clearly thrilled when Phillips cued up a clip from Sally Potter's Yes (2004), calling that stylistically eclectic drama, written wholly in iambic-pentameter, "a movie that about 50 people saw," but one that she loved as both a working experience and a final product.  Clearly the film was new even for this savvy audience of festival-goers, who might have enjoyed seeing more Alleniana they didn't already know.

That said, Allen's recollections about her Academy-nominated turns in Nixon and The Crucible were among her most detailed and revealing.  In the first case, responding to Phillips's query about whether it was difficult to empathize with Plastic Pat, Allen avowed quite the opposite.  Reprising biographical details as though she had just researched the role yesterday, she feelingly reported that Pat Nixon lost her mother around age 13 and then nursed her father through the last stages of cancer at 17 or 18, pooling tuition money with her two brothers so that one of them maintained the household while the other two attended college at any given time. They rotated this arrangement until all of them finished.  Even so, Pat's acquaintances from youth universally described her as outgoing and "happy-go-lucky"; clearly she was both prepared for marriage to a man who would require lots of careful tending and yet emotionally transformed by that union.  Allen described as a cornerstone of her performance a story she heard from a White House consultant who spotted Pat one evening left alone by her husband, dancing by herself with arms outstretched to music that was still emanating from a just-finished state dinner downstairs. In the actress's words, "This was not a president like Mr. Obama, who has dinner with his family every night.  Or so we've been told."

As for crossing paths with Elizabeth Procter, Allen confessed it was a genuine first for her: "I kind of couldn't believe I was as old as I was, having worked so long in theater, and I had never seen or read The Crucible." Forced to audition for the part (indeed, to read many times for director Nicholas Hytner), Allen felt freed by her lack of pre-conceptions about a role that fellow actors kept describing as a trap: "I guess they felt she easily became kind of holier-than-thou, or too pious or something."  Unaware of choices prior interpreters had made, Allen simply made the choices that felt right for the script and found out later whether these were familiar ones—resulting in what I still consider a peak performance in a stellar career.  I would say the same of Daniel Day-Lewis's lead work in the same film, which may be no coincidence.  "People often ask, 'Hey, aren't you intimidated to work with actors like Anthony Hopkins?' or whomever, but I always feel like, 'No, they'll probably make me better!'"  This prospect, of course, works both ways, though as Phillips facetiously chirped, "It's a shame you've had to work with so many hacks!  I mean, Kevin Kline? Day-Lewis?"

Allen side-stepped a can't-win question about seeking good women's roles in Hollywood, holding to specific comments on particular roles and projects.  These ranged from humorous confessions (The Bourne Supremacy was rewritten so constantly throughout production that she didn't even bother bringing her script to the set) to more nervous admissions (she held out against taking Pleasantville, a movie she's now very proud of, because "if there was any typecasting in my work at that point, it was a little bit like, 'The Wronged Wife'").  She probably got her biggest laugh when answering honestly Phillips's probe about whether her 18-year-old daughter has a favorite among Mom's movies.  "Oh, I don't know.  She hasn't seen a lot of my work.  Probably Death Race?"  The event's peremptory wrap-up began here, with Kutza replacing Phillips onstage, Allen receiving her as-yet unengraved Hugo, and the audience realizing there would be no questions from the floor.

I, of course, take the view that God did not give me a larynx so that I could sit in Joan Allen's presence and not engage her in conversation.  Close friends will already know the pet question I was eager to pose after sidling up to her, while she amiably signed Upside of Anger posters and posed for iPhone snaps with beaming, seemingly speechless admirers.  Struck at close range by her uncanny luminescence (fawning to admit, but completely true), I thanked her for all her tremendous work, and I told her about the great response Bobby Fischer got from my college freshmen last year.  I also introduced her to the two new friends I had made while waiting in line, united by our adoration for Campbell Scott's Off the Map, a tender Southwestern memory piece with a never-earthier Allen, a heartbreaking Sam Elliott, and a Nick's Flick Picks favorite, The Wire's Jim True-Frost.  "Ohhh, Off the Map!" Allen cooed, hand going to her throat, with (to me) thrilling affection for a quiet little movie I really love, and which waited two years for its minuscule release. "Is there another movie that you're especially fond or proud of that isn't in the group you normally get asked about," I asked, "or that maybe didn't get the commercial shake you feel it deserved?"  She laughed and aimed those incredible almond eyes toward the ceiling for a moment. "Well, Searching for Bobby Fischer is certainly one of them. And Off the Map is definitely, definitely another. And the Sally Potter movie, which I was so glad he included," referring to the earlier exchange about Yes.  "That's probably the group."

What's wonderful about Allen is that "the group" is in fact so large. She's appeared in so many movies that make striking first impressions and pay such rich dividends on return visits that even 90 minutes is not enough to scratch the surface. Face/Off (1997) and Upside slid under the radar, as did When the Sky Falls (2000), her barely-veiled Veronica Guerin biopic that went straight to video in the U.S., despite her tough, involving performance.  We heard nothing about A Good Marriage, the Stephen King vehicle that will soon restore her to leading-lady stature, even if she doesn't necessarily aspire to that.  "The thing with The Contender," she stated near the end of her confab with Phillips, "is that even though I was recognized as a leading actress for that role, that's a very 'ensemble' film, which is one of the things I love about it."  One of the things I love about Allen is that she still perceives herself as a team player, even as evidence constantly reveals her as a cut above even her most distinguished company.

See the World through Rainbow-Colored Glasses... Especially on Tuesday!

I know a lot of you movie-heads in Chicago will be trying to hit the new and prodigious-sounding Nuri Bilge Ceylan film on its Tuesday night screening at CIFF. But if you've noticed that screening is already sold out—or if a three-hour Turkish police procedural lit almost entirely by automotive headlights in the pitch-darkness of a rural plain sounds to you like what Justin Vivian Bond would call "a real weenie-shrinker"—then all the more reason to stop by Sidetrack on Halsted this Tuesday night for the kickoff event of Queer Vision, a new program co-sponsored by the popular watering hole and by Chicago's Queer Film Society.

If you've ever been to Sidetrack, there's a 28% chance that you stumbled into Showtune Nights on Sunday or Monday, where the bar broadcasts famous Broadway numbers, Tony performances, clips from movie musicals, and inspired diva turns, and the whole joint sings along, brilliantly, uproariously, and open-heartedly. The Queer Film Society thought a similar blend of cultural history, community, and liquored-up conviviality ought to be possible using clips of some of our favorite movies. Our fearless president Richard Knight—who gives a fuller sense of the QFS, the Queer Vision project, and the expansive range of "queer cinema" in this RedEye interview—has labored with some industrious collaborators to curate a whole range of clips: the fabulous, the hummable, the historic, the barely-seen, the hilarious, the sexy, the romantic, and the overlaps therein.

Please come. Admission is a $10 donation to QFS, which works hard all year long to plan advanced screenings of Hollywood, independent, and international movies of specific interest to queer audiences. This is how LGBT Chicagoans saw A Single Man, Nine, The September Issue, Howl, Quearborn & Perversion, and a bunch of others weeks before anyone else, and in cahoots with a huge theater of people to whom these movies really meant something. The group also lobbies with publicists and distributors to try to secure theatrical playdates for some titles that would otherwise pass us by entirely in the increasingly stressed-out market of commercial exhibition. We also do educational and outreach work around the city whenever possible, such as hosting those sold-out screenings of Chicago-set queer films of recent decades that played in the Cultural Center this past spring, followed by post-film Q&As that we organized and emceed.

It's a great cause, and with your $10 comes a complimentary cocktail, so Mary, lay down that Hamilton. Make this first outing a hit, and we'll be able to reprise regularly, in the good graces of the stellar folks and all-around nice guys who manage Sidetrack. Look forward to seeing you there!

Kicking Off Chicago Film Fest 2011

The picture at left is not of me queued up early, desperate to buy my tickets to the 47th Chicago International Film Festival; my hijab is a different color and pattern than this one. Still, you get the basic idea from this image: me waving whatever bills I could find, an unseen presence dispensing the goodies, people behind me going, "What's she so agitated about?"

This is the third year running I've popped into the Cinema/Chicago office as the clock struck 10am on the first day of members-only ticket sales, which is how I had a ticket to Black Swan last year and all the angry people at the Will Call at AMC River East didn't. Technically, as an accredited member of the press corps and, this year, a member of the Short Film Competition Jury, I don't even need to buy tickets, but among other caveats of this very generous offer, that only counts if I'm willing to wait until 10 minutes till showtime to know if I have a seat. You know I don't play like that, and besides, supporting Cinema/Chicago is a really good thing to do, if you can manage.

In truth, I'll be taking advantage of those privileges several times during the Festival, allowing myself to be surprised by what's on and available, and obeying my usual practice of avoiding the big fall releases and Oscar contenders as much as I can manage (with, this year, two irresistible exceptions). But in terms of what I've already committed to seeing at the longest-running competitive film festival in North America, cherry-picking hits from Sundance, SXSW, Berlin, Cannes, and Toronto, these are the baker's dozen I've already laid down for. You can count on brief reports, at least, in addition to hot tips about all the shorts and anything that gets pre-screened for critics at a time I can make during a busy season at the office:

Cairo 678 (Egypt, dir. Mohamed Diab; Main Competition)

Goodbye (Iran, dir. Mohammad Rasoulof; Main Competition)

Goodbye, First Love (France/Germany, dir. Mia Hansen-Løve; Main Competition)

Kinyarwanda (USA, dir. Alrick Brown; World Cinema/Black Perspectives)

Loverboy (Romania, dir. Catalin Mitulescu; World Cinema)

Melancholia (Denmark/Sweden, dir. Lars von Trier; Special Presentations)

Miss Bala (Mexico, dir. Gerardo Naranjo; Main Competition)

Natural Selection (USA, dir. Robbie Pickering; World Cinema)

Sleeping Beauty (Australia, dir. Julia Leigh; World Cinema/ReelWomen)

The Slut (Israel, dir. Hagar Ben-Asher; New Directors/ReelWomen)

Snowtown (Australia, dir. Justin Kurzel; After Dark)

Tomboy (France, dir. Céline Sciamma; World Cinema/Outrageous/ReelWomen)

We Need To Talk About Kevin (UK, dir. Lynne Ramsay; Special Presentation)


I might have been weak and bought a ticket to the forthcoming Coriolanus and I certainly would have made a point of catching Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, but they're up against unmovable commitments for my job. I'll also be heading out of town to a conference on closing night, so I'll be seeing The Artist with all the rest of you whenever Harvey Weinstein is good and ready to show it to us. Otherwise, though, do visit my pre-prepared listing of major competition slates or the full festival guide and let me know, as some of you have already started doing on Twitter, whether I'm in danger of skipping anything that I really, absolutely shouldn't. The more unheralded, the better!

(Still images are from Main Competition title Cairo 678, special one-night presentation Melancholia, and documentary short film Grandpa's Wet Dream.)

Monday Reviews: Leap Year

Finally, a full review cranked out for one of the films I've been screening in the weeks leading up to the official launch, this coming Friday, of the 46th Chicago International Film Festival. The movie I picked is the first one I screened, and one that is bound to enter discussion at the "Sex on Screen" panel that CIFF has invited me to join on Saturday: it's Michael Rowe's Leap Year, a prizewinner for Best First Film at last spring's Cannes Film Festival. More than one colleague has described Leap Year to me as a kind of shabby shocker, almost obnoxiously lacking anything to say and putting its female lead in needlessly compromising positions. I can't defend the fully from having fewer ideas at its core than it seems like it ought to, but I think the direction is refreshingly unhysterical given the premise and trajectory, and I was altogether impressed. Full review here, and thanks for waiting well past the usual midnight posting hour!

In Which Nick Savors a Lovely Moment

Today's Chicago Film Festival press screenings of Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy and Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats (wonderful and good, respectively) marked only the second time in four years that I have swung an invitation to the venue where the critics for the major Chicago media outlets screen the bulk of the films they review. I like seeing movies with an audience, but I'm not so jaded as not to enjoy this rare incursion into the sanctum of the paid professionals. And who among us wouldn't feel a surge of joy at hearing a voice from the hallway saying to some invisible interlocutor, "Chaz and Roger are on their way up"?

Congenitally early, especially for what I had gathered was upper-tier Kiarostami and top-drawer Binoche, I was in my aisle seat, third row from the back, virtually from the moment they opened the screening room. I didn't realize that, once the Eberts had arrived, Roger had placed himself two rows behind me and that, since I'm rather tall, my head might be blocking part of his view. About five minutes into the movie, as William Shimell's "James Miller" got going with his self-satisfied press conference, my peripheral vision caught someone signaling me from just behind my shoulder and to my left: Roger, standing in the aisle. For reasons we all know, he was signaling with hands and gaze rather than words, and the predictable upshot had a lovely extra accent: he wanted me to scooch just a bit out of his eyeline, but not so far that I would block his wife's. "James Miller" needs some tutelage during Certified Copy about how to make a partner feel appreciated, but Roger Ebert obviously doesn't. I migrated one seat, but not two, and looked back to make sure I had understood what he wanted. He looked wholly grateful, but of course he couldn't speak that aloud, either.

So – he gave me a thumbs up. Imagine!

Unlike most of the critics who attended Certified Copy, he stayed for Heartbeats, which started a half-hour later. I noticed he was grabbing some shut-eye between the two movies, and I didn't want to bother him anyway, so I quickly scribbled a note, folded it, and wrote his name across the top, so I could leave it on the seat next to him. But when I re-entered the room to subtly deposit my letter, he was fully awake again and made instant and friendly eye-contact, so I handed him the note in person. So lovely to have an impromptu chance to speak from your heart to someone whom you admire but never expect to thank directly. My note, in certified copy:

Dear Roger,

I teach film studies and occasionally film reviewing in the English Department at Northwestern. You mean so much to so many of my students.

Thanks, in perpetuity, for everything you do, from them and from me. To get a thumbs-up from you—if only for scooting over a seat!—is such a special treat.

With such debts and affection,
Nick Davis

Chicago Film Festival 2010

The full lineup for the 46th Chicago Film Festival, the longest-running competitive film festival in North America, went live on the web last night at midnight. Members of the non-profit umbrella organization Cinema/Chicago get to buy tickets today and tomorrow before the full onslaught begins on Friday. I might be officially the biggest CIFF nerd in the city, having bought all my tickets in person at the office from the minute the second hand hit 10:00:00 this morning. They all have a little "#1" on them, referring to the fact that I was first in line, so my film-festival OCD can be preserved for future generations.

Not much Venice carry-over but quite a bit from Berlin, which pleases, since that festival's entrants tend to have a harder time reaching the U.S. Plus, a full half of the official Cannes competition slate. I told you this festival works hard to be au courant. As per usual, though, it's just as thrilling to see how loaded the large World Cinema program is with titles and directors I've never heard of, and with appearances by personal favorites like Since Otar Left's Julie Bertuccelli whose recent works have been flying slightly under the radar, and with festival phenoms I haven't yet encountered, like Aaron Katz and Xavier Dolan. Dolan's second film, Heartbeats will play along with Bertuccelli's The Tree in the New Directors competition, reserved for filmmakers' first and second features, and also in the "Outrageous" LGBT program, burgeoning from six entries last year to nine in 2010. (I have it on good authority that Dolan's even better-received debut I Killed My Mother, which apparently got a nominal NYC/LA release this summer, will appear as part of the queer Reeling Film Festival in Chicago in November, so put $10 aside now!)

Official press screenings aren't tremendously numerous, leading nicely to the media mostly seeing the films alongside "real" audiences. Between those that have been formally scheduled and the tickets I scooped up out of my own pocket this morning, based on the color-coded Excel sheet I rocked so hard into the wee hours of night, here are the films I'm currently slated to see, in addition to the four I've already screened:

Amphetamine (Hong Kong, dir. Scud; Outrageous)

Black Field (Greece, dir. Vardis Marinakis; New Directors)

Black Swan (USA, dir. Darren Aronofsky; Special Presentation)

Caterpillar (Japan, dir. Kôji Wakamatsu; World Cinema)

Certified Copy (France/Italy/Iran, dir. Abbas Kiarostami; Main Competition)

Cold Weather (USA, dir. Aaron Katz; World Cinema)

Heartbeats (Canada, dir. Xavier Dolan; New Directors)

The Housemaid (South Korea, dir. Im Sang-soo; World Cinema)

How I Ended the Summer (Russia, dir. Aleksei Popgrebsky; Main Competition)

If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle (Romania, dir. Florin Serban; World Cinema)

Loose Cannons (Italy, dir. Ferzan Ozpetek; Outrageous)

Love Like Poison (France, dir. Katell Quillévéré; New Directors)

Love Translated (Canada/Ukraine, dir. Julia Ivanova; DocuFest)

Of Love and Other Demons (Costa Rica/Colombia, dir. Hilda Hidalgo; World Cinema)

On Tour (Tournée) (France, dir. Mathieu Amalric; World Cinema)

Revolución (Mexico, dir. Misc.; Special Presentation)

The Robber (Austria/Germany, dir. Benjamin Heisenberg; Main Competition)

A Screaming Man (Chad, dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun; Main Competition)

The Sentiment of the Flesh (France, dir. Roberto Garzelli; New Directors)

The Tree (Australia, dir. Julie Bertuccelli; New Directors)

Tuesday, After Christmas (Romania, dir. Radu Muntean; Main Competition)

Waste Land (UK/Brazil, dir. Lucy Walker; DocuFest)

We Are What We Are (Mexico, dir. Jorge Michel Grau; Main Competition)


I also bought tickets to two groups of collected shorts, the scary Midnight Mayhem program and the Tales of the Unexpected collection, which I'm guessing means the "weird" ones, and includes the James Franco-directed Feast of Stephen.

But you know I love to give you all homework, and since I will have possibilities to add here and there to this itinerary, have a look at my CIFF 2010 page and let me know if you recognize anything in the Main or New Directors Competitions or the Outrageous lineup that you think I'm short-changing. Or, obviously, if there's anything else in the full schedule that you can vouch for. I am aware of skimping on the documentary offerings at present, but I cannot say a lot of them sound like they're up my particular alley. Happy to be instructed otherwise, though. Whereas I'm unlikely to take any hints to check out Special Presentations of 127 Hours, Fair Game, Made in Dagenham, The Tempest, and other Oscar hopefuls that will be easy enough to track down later. I did make one exception to that rule for Black Swan, following the same "But I'm Gonna Explode If I Don't!" principle that I followed last year into Precious. But that's it.

I'll add in closing that Sex Magic: Manifesting Maya, the documentary I screened this morning, was funny, unpredictable, and frank, not just in its advertised sexual explicitness but in the extensive, casual access that its key figures enable into a subject that can be very hard to make a documentary about that isn't stuck operating from a considerable distance. I'll be seeing as much as possible of the sex-focused material in the lineup, because that's how I suffer for my job. That is, not only have I published on films in that vein, so one must keep up, but the Festival office has asked me to speak on an October 9 panel about Sex and Cinema, alongside the makers of some of this year's movies. I have been asked to track down those directors' work and to follow all the envelopes they have pushed therein. I was even encouraged to wear to the panel what I was wearing last night to the pre-festival press kickoff, where the invitation was very kindly and unexpectedly extended.

It's one of those life lessons people can be slow to divulge, even though it's been known since the time of Confucius: if you're hoping opportunity will find you, give it a little nudge by wearing hot pink.

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."

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!

QFS: Desperate Living

Chicagoans! Don't forget the screening of John Waters's Desperate Living taking place tonight at the Center on Halsted! Admission is free, but the Queer Film Society, which I told you about before, suggests a donation of $5, and I know you are good for at least that much. You're getting John Waters, a live audience, DVD giveaways, and, doubtless, a whole candy shop of bon mots, in and out of the film. So, come out! (And come out to the movie!)

Announcing the Queer Film Society

I am delighted to help spread the word about Chicago's new Queer Film Society, an organization founded earlier this year by Richard Knight of the Windy City Times and Knight at the Movies. Richard and fellow members Hank Sartin of Time Out Chicago, Gregg Shapiro of Chicago Free Press, and Jonathan Lewis and Charlie Shoquist of Gay Chicago felt that local film culture and its audiences would appreciate and benefit from an ongoing network of conversations, screenings, and events that placed queer-targeted releases and queer-appropriated classics in a privileged spotlight, opening up the depth, the history, and the merriment of sexuality and LGBT livelihood as they overlap with cinema. In fact, though the organization is starting and based in Chicago, it has its heart set on bigger, more widely inclusive goals. From the website:

Recognizing the diversity of identities and perspectives that comprise its membership, QFS is committed to showcasing vital films from equally vital, and sometimes widely varied, vantage points. From mainstream to underground and from artist to audience, a distinct and communal sensibility informs the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) cinema experience.

The QFS website endeavors to be a global gathering spot for the reviews and film writing of its membership and other LGBT film critics, historians, artists, and scholars.

The Chicago chapter of the QFS, home base of the Society, endeavors to create a variety of entertaining and educational cinema experiences for both QFS members and Friends of the QFS and hopes, through such events, to inspire the creation of QFS chapters in other cities.

If you live in Chicago, you can already be enjoying these hosted screenings at our beloved Center on Halsted, a QFS co-sponsor: next up are Barbarella on Monday night, and John Waters' Desperate Living the following Monday, the 21st. (I'm already geared up for that one!) QFS will also sponsor events this year at both the Chicago International Film Festival in October and the LGBT Reeling Film Festival in November.

I have recently joined as a sixth member, so watch this space, including the newly dedicated plot on my sidebar, for continued updates about QFS activities. But even more immediately, here are four things you can do to support the Society as it gets on its feet:

• Show your support and add yourself to the mailing list by signing up here as a Friend of the Society, which makes you eligible for several free advance-screenings of queer-targeted movies that are already being orchestrated through the rest of the fall, including the one I saw last night of the Vogue/Anna Wintour documentary The September Issue. Even if you do not live locally but plan to check out the site, or if you wonder about opening your own branch, or if you simply think it's a good thing for QFS to exist and proliferate, become a Friend! It is crucial to developing the organization, persuading distributors, securing venues, and building up $$$.

• Attend our events, and tell or bring your friends. Early shows of community support are especially vital, while we're attracting sponsorships and negotiating with studios for exclusive screenings, which have already started to happen.

• If your background and interests suggest that you might be a good fit to join QFS as a full member, or to introduce or respond at a screening, or to host an event in a venue where you have some sway, or to write up QFS in a public forum where you have a voice, etc., etc., please be in touch, either with me or with the current officers on the website. Given the age-old trends of gendered and racial chauvinism in film criticism, we are especially interested in diversifying our membership and hearing from queer film critics, writers, teachers, and professionals who can help remind our audiences that Queer ≠ Gay + White + Male.

• Don't freak out that I mentioned $$$. I don't have a lot of it, either, especially with how depleted people are these days and how many emergencies and justice campaigns are in need of our support. But you'd be surprised how little can be a big help to a non-profit arts initiative like this. What you'd spend on a movie ticket and a pail of Goobers would be a much appreciated boon to QFS. Again, if you're feeling generous (and I hope you are!), be in touch with me or with the current officers.