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!

Supporting Actress Sundays: 1990

It's That Time of the Month again, when all of the acolytes of actressing collect at StinkyLulu's house to stump for and swipe at the best and the worst of a given year's Best Supporting Actress Oscar roster. Up to bat this month are the contenders from 1990. Together, they constitute a redoubtable and dissimilar field of actresses but, perhaps, a middle-of-the-road group of performances. You can, and should, read all about that over at the Smackdown. Dip into the warm, perfumed waters of the Comments section, and you'll also see that my own dream list of nominees for that year is probably:

GLENN CLOSE in Reversal of Fortune, who somehow missed a mention despite the film's multiple noms in leading categories, and despite being an 0-for-5 bridesmaid that everyone seems to like;
WHOOPI GOLDBERG in Ghost, who actually won the thing and, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't owe anybody an apology for that;
DIANE LADD in Wild at Heart, a performance championed by several Smackdowners despite the fact that most of us, myself included, have little love for the film;
JENNIFER JASON LEIGH in Miami Blues, who Tim and I agree does an affecting, funny, and atypically unhistrionic job of underplaying her dim Florida call-girl (and has the cinema's all-time best scene concerning vinegar pie); and
SHIRLEY MACLAINE in Postcards from the Edge, a film which you should already know is a favorite, in which MacLaine is an almost Whoopi-level hoot and a holler, and also a game belter and a surprisingly tough cookie, doing a terrific acting duet with Meryl Streep

Mary Alice in To Sleep with Anger might belong here, but she's construable as a lead, and I haven't seen the film in a long while. Helen Mirren also deserves a consolation prize, or maybe an actual nod, for making such brilliant, suggestive use of her screen time in The Comfort of Strangers, acing that Pinter dialogue and adopting a demure voice and delicate demeanor that still puts everyone on edge.

Of the three actress vehicles from 1990 that I screened in the last 24 hours, as a build-up exercise to this morning's Smackdown, the jewel is Paul Brickman's Men Don't Leave, in which fans of You Can Count on Me or Truly, Madly, Deeply will recognize another tart, carefully measured, wonderfully acted tale of bereavement, quiet comedy, and persuasively wrought ties to family, neighbors, lovers, and friends. Joan Cusack gives one of her best Kooky Joan performances as the downstairs eccentric who's putting the moves on Jessica Lange's 17-year-old son, very well played by Chris O'Donnell; Arliss Howard and Kathy Bates are also incredibly deft and funny in their roles as Lange's pseudo boyfriend and insensitive boss. Lange comes closer to Tootsie-style melancholy comedy than she has before or since, and it's nice to see her at comparative ease for once. The writing, especially in the first two-thirds of the film, is clever and economical, and the editing achieves poignancy not by dawdling but through carefully timed pruning and expertly showcased moments. B

Bates pops up in a single scene of Luis Mandoki's White Palace, which also features a generation-gap relationship where the woman is again the senior partner. Susan Sarandon has several effective scenes as a working-class waitress at a "White Palace" restaurant that primarily slings bite-sized hamburgers (uh....), and James Spader gives his eerie, clammy eroticism another go as the upwardly mobile yuppie whom Sarandon takes home for a hot roll in the sack. Spader has a Sadness in His Past that he won't snap out of; Sarandon also has a Sadness in Her Past that she pretends to have snapped out of, which is a good thing, because the screenplay barely makes it playable. All in all, White Palace is one of those movies that rails against embarrassment and deceit while constantly lying and emanating embarrassment about the grief, the religious disparity, and the class divide between its characters, though Sarandon does sell a great fuck-you speech as she storms out of a well-appointed Thanksgiving dinner. C

The movie could have been worse but also could have been much better, which also describes Philip Kaufman's gorgeously photographed Henry & June. Sadly, the director's follow-up to The Unbearable Lightness of Being is nowhere near as confident or as mysterious. The effortful recreation of 1930s Paris looks fussy and tacky despite Philippe Rousselot's diligent attempts to sublimate it, the script is full of faux-serious and ersatz-literary howlers, and the cast simply isn't up to the complexities or the charismas of their characters. Fred Ward and Maria de Medeiros give things an honest go, but either they don't have a knack for stylized performance, or else their maladroit versions of realist acting come across as failed stylization. Kevin Spacey and Richard E. Grant are cloying in second-tier parts, and Uma Thurman is, as so often, a disaster. The period seemingly means nothing to her except a reason to assume awkwardly "sultry" poses and stares in a series of exotic outfits, and she hasn't got the head for the writerly themes nor the physical grace required for the slinky character and mise-en-scène. Some welcome touches of wit are scattered through the film, and you can see the smarter, tighter movie lurking beneath the existing version, but it's still a bit of an ordeal. C

As for the nominated Supporting Actress movies, I'd give The Grifters a B– for nastily diverting but annoyingly hollow showmanship; Goodfellas an A– for prodigious, engaging technique and daringly comic overtones, whatever its lapses into autopilot machismo and style for style's sake; Ghost a B+ (and y'all can complain if you want to) for playing its sentimental plotline affectingly straight and also for laughs, and working the machinery of Pop Cinema quite deftly; Wild at Heart a C+ for finding 20 minutes' worth of truly startling images within 124 minutes' worth of drafty self-indulgence; and Dances with Wolves a B for telling an embarrassingly Uncle Tom's Cabin-level tale of white male sentiment, and orbiting around a terrible Costner performance, but nonetheless achieving real majesty in its score, its cinematography, and its editing.