Basketball! Olympics! Documentary! World War II! Fantastic freak-flag tie-dyed costumes in national colors courtesy of the Grateful Dead! Uplift! Fuck the Cold War! Fuck the commies! More uplift! Up with Lithuania! Marius Markevicius’ scattered but vivid “The Other Dream Team,” chronicles the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, where the braggadocio of the “Dream Team” of the USA was matched by the brawn of three-million-strong Lithuania’s national team, which took the bronze despite having just emerged from the chill of decades under Soviet domination. Politics and sports clash, then blend, to satisfying result. Archival footage dating back to the 1930s is the film’s biggest thrill unless, of course, you care about the Olympics, basketball, or are Lithuanian-American. With squadrons of talking heads, including New Yorker editor David Remnick and some extremely charming, exceptionally tall guys, including Arvydas Sabonis, Sarunas Marciulionis, Jonas Valanciunas, Arturas Karnisovas and Vytautas Landsbergis. 88m. (Ray Pride)
“The Other Dream Team” opens Friday at Landmark Century.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
Fall Arts Preview 2020: Manual Cinema's Candyman Dream While Manual Cinema—the Chicago-based performance collective, design studio and film and video production company can’t squeak a peep about their work until the Universal release sees daylight, the work, weirdly, wordless, worries up a world all its own.
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